Upload
others
View
5
Download
0
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
Présenté et soutenu par : Alexandra LACARRIÈRE Directeur de Recherche : Philippe BIRGY Assesseur de Recherche : David ROCHE Mémoire de Master 1 Recherche - Études du Monde Anglophone: « Thanatography in Stephen King’s Short Stories: The Triumph of the Fantastic Genre » A literary study of a corpus of five short fictions : « Willa », « You Know
They Got a Hell of a Band », « That Feeling You Can Only Say What It
Is In French », « The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates » and
« Afterlife ».
Année Universitaire 2015-2016
2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: ...................................................................................................... 5
I) THANATOGRAPHIC WRITING ......................................................................... 9
A) THANATOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................. 9
1) Modes and Voices of the Narrative Entity ....................................................... 10
2) The Trope of Prosopopeia ............................................................................... 11
B) THE JOURNEY OF THE DEAD ........................................................................................................... 11
1) A New Kind of Ghost Fiction ........................................................................... 11
2) Passing on to the Afterlife ............................................................................... 14
3) Confronting Death ........................................................................................... 15
C) A BRUTALIZING RITE OF PASSAGE ............................................................................................... 17
1) The Character’s Uncertainty and Denial ........................................................ 17
2) The Loss of Memory ........................................................................................ 18
3) The Loss of Language Skills ............................................................................ 19
4) The Loss of Vision ........................................................................................... 20
II) A LIMINAL PLACE IN SPACE AND TIME ................................................... 21
A) THE AFTERLIFE SETTING: SITTING IN LIMBO .............................................................................. 22
1) A Place that Looks Like Hell ........................................................................... 22
2) A Heterotopic Liminal Space ........................................................................... 24
B) VISUAL AND TEMPORAL DISCREPANCIES: A SENSORY DEFAMILIARIZATION .................. 26
1) The Familiarization with a Foreign Environment: Confusion ........................ 26
2) The Trope of Defamiliarization ....................................................................... 28
3) The Unsettling Time Discrepancies ................................................................. 31
III) THE SUPERNATURAL’S CLASH WITH THE DOGMAS OF GOD ........ 34
A) THE FANTASTIC’S RULE OVER RATIONAL THINKING ......................................................... 34
1) The Hesitation of the Characters ..................................................................... 35
2) The Affirmation of the Fantastic ...................................................................... 36
B) THE UNKNOWN: THE TROPE OF TERROR ................................................................................ 36
1) The Fear of the Unknown ................................................................................ 36
2) The Omnipresence of Death ............................................................................ 40
C) KING'S FANTASTIC IMAGINARY AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE RELIGIOUS WORLD VIEW ............... 43
3
1) Religion Anchored in American Society .......................................................... 43
2) Religion as an Ominous Instance .................................................................... 44
3) Ritual Reenactment: The Trope of the Afterlife ............................................... 46
4) Alternative Representations of the Afterlife ..................................................... 48
CONCLUSION: ......................................................................................................... 51
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................... 54
4
“To die, to sleep - To sleep, perchance to dream - ay, there's the rub,
For in this sleep of death what dreams may come...” ― William Shakespeare, Hamlet1
“Soon you will be where your own eyes will see the source and cause and give you their own answer to the
mystery.” ― Dante Alighieri, Inferno2
1 Shakespeare, William and Harold Jenkins. Hamlet. London: Methuen, 1982. 2 Dante, Alighieri, C. H Sisson, and David H Higgins. The Divine Comedy, Oxford [England]: Oxford University Press, 1993.
5
INTRODUCTION:
Roland Barthes believed in the mortality of each second as it passed and of
each word as it was pronounced, for a lover’s speech and the time spent with them, to
him, were only alive in their immediate occurrence:
La voix de l’être aimé je ne la connais jamais que morte, remémorée, rappelée à l’intérieur de ma tête, bien au-dèla de l’oreille; voix ténue et cependant monumentale, puisqu’elle est de ces objets qui n’ont d’existence qu’une fois disparus.3
For Barthes, speech can only exist through its death and the memory of its passing left
behind as it dies. He establishes a parallel between the sound of words being
pronounced and the essence of a person, who, in the same manner, cannot exist in life
without ‘dying’4 first. The symbolic linguistic reflection on the inflection of a voice
translates Barthes’ attempt at deciphering mankind’s own ineluctable mortality.
Everlastingly, in philosophy as well as in literature, the inevitable death of
each individual that constitutes the whole of humanity has been the most centric and
recurring of topics. Besides the inevitability of death, what has fascinated thinkers and
writers are the factors of death that cannot be explained, one could say the ‘mysteries’
that surround this final act in life. These individuals set their interest in the thought
that perhaps dying is not as final as it may appear, and through this contemplation, the
notion of the afterlife emerged. The trope of the afterlife has been present in literature
and folklore since the birth of writing. Mythological texts and legends such as the
ones provided by the Ancient Greek societies and later by Judaism (in the form of the
Biblical scriptures) have told tales of men exploring the possibilities of life after
death.
Today, Stephen King is one of the most prolific and famous American authors
that continuously tackles the issues of death through fictional literature. His genres of
predilection, fantasy and horror, have allowed him to expand on the mysteries that
surround death with imaginative and innovative themes and techniques, detaching
himself from the former melancholic reflections on man’s mortality and asserting his
works as unpretentious literary entertainment for the masses. In this sense, King’s
constant search for new topics and narrative plots have led him to explore this 3 Barthes, Roland. Fragments d'un discours amoureux. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977. 4 Here, the act of ‘dying’ can be understood, according to Barthes’ philosophy, as the fact that a human being can exist only through another mind’s recollection, through the emotional and neurological construction one makes of another person that is no longer present or alive.
6
existentialist enigma of life after death. Many critics have overlooked this topic and
have studied Stephen King through his most famous novels and their film adaptations
such as Carrie, It, The Shinning and Cujo, only to cite a few. Most of the remaining
studies have focused on King’s treatment of certain horror themes such as pyro-
kinesics, mental illness and his recycling of well-known horror tropes such the
vampire or the haunting ghost. However, little attention has been paid to his collection
of short stories despite the fact that it represents a great proportion of his whole
literary corpus. Nevertheless, some short fictions have stood out among others, one
could think of “Children of the Corn” from 1977 and “1408” from 1999. In the case
of these two short stories, the attention that has been given to the texts is also related
to cinema, for both have been adapted to the big screen in 1984 and 2007
respectively, highlighting once again the recurring treatment of this author’s work.
Hence, the interest of the present study is firstly that very little to none academic
studies could be found about the trope of the afterlife in Stephen King’s bibliography,
presenting a void in academia that we will shortly attempt to fill. Secondly, we have
selected a corpus of short fictions in order to broaden the critical and academic
dialogue on Stephen King by focusing on the author’s literary format that is most
neglected until this day and generally understated in contemporary society that prefers
longer formats in literature or even their subsequent visual adaptation.
The corpus at hand has been chosen from Stephen King’s entire short stories
collection. Out of over one hundred short stories, five of them have been selected as
representatives of one common theme: the trope of afterlife. The first one of these
short stories, “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band” was taken from the 1991
collection Nightmares And Dreamscapes. The second comes from the 2002 collection
Everything’s Eventual and is called “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In
French”. The following two “The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates” and
“Willa” were published in the 2008 collection Just After Sunset. The fifth and final
short story for this corpus is “Afterlife” and was published in King’s latest short
fiction collection The Bazaar Of Bad Dreams in 2015.
The dominating literary trope of the afterlife that binds these five short fictions
together calls for several different perspectives of analysis. In this corpus, the notion
of the afterlife primarily raises questions concerning the setting. How does Stephen
King represent the environment of the afterlife in these short fictions? In this sense,
the contemporary societal constructions of life after death that prevail in American
7
society will be contrasted with the different settings King provides for his stories.
This American collective imaginary related to the life of the deceased is closely
linked with the religious beliefs that predominate in the United States. Indeed, the
Christian notions of heaven, hell and even purgatory highly influence the five short
stories under study, and even more so, the narratives are influenced by the moral
values attached to each of these notions. However, Stephen King detaches his fiction
from the imaginary of the Christian dogmas to offer the reader an innovative
treatment of the scenery in which the characters evolve. Michel Foucault’s theories on
heterotopia will serve the description of the narrative techniques at work in Stephen
King’s construction of the afterlife setting. Quant aux hétérotopies proprement dites, comment pourrait-on les décrire, quel sens ont-elles? On pourrait supposer, je ne dis pas une science parce que c'est un mot qui est trop galvaudé maintenant, mais une sorte de description systématique qui aurait pour objet, dans une société donnée, l'étude, l'analyse, la description, la " lecture ", comme on aime à dire maintenant, de ces espaces différents, ces autres lieux, une espèce de contestation à la fois mythique et réelle de l'espace où nous vivons; cette description pourrait s'appeler l'hétérotopologie.5
The heterotopic space points to the distances established between what is
known and recognizable and what is “different”, thus it translates the liminal nature of
the specific narrative genre we are dealing with in this corpus. In this sense, a new
perspective of analysis appears and calls for the study of the protagonists and the way
they are presented and given a narrative voice. Firstly, we will see how narrative
polyphony is accomplished by the use of prosopopeia (a central trope to our study for
a great amount of the characters are deceased) that allows for the silence of the dead
to be broken. The treatment of the narrative voice given to these characters will be
explained through the notion of ‘thanatography’6. Originally posited by Jacques
Derrida, the notion was used to describe an author’s personal morbid imagination that
lead to a contemplation of death. Nowadays, the term ‘thanatography’ has evolved
and it is used to describe the literary genre in which the diegetic narration takes place
from the afterlife. Secondly, to understand better the genre, we will attempt to show
5 Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias." Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984): 46-49. The text was originally presented at the French “Conférence au Cercle d'études architecturales”, and it was based on a lecture given by Foucault in Tunisia on March 1967. The text was never revised and corrected by the author and so Michel Foucault only allowed its publication in 1984. 6 The notion originally appeared in Derrida’s Otobiographies (see following footnote), in which he studied Nietzche and other writers’ treatment of death in their autobiographies.
8
how the characters are depicted in these five thanatographies. For this, Rachel
Falconer’s notion of the ‘descent narrative7’ will come to use in order to describe the
journey that the deceased protagonists undertake. Her definition of what constitutes
hell in contemporary Western culture and literature will serve our description of the
hardship the characters go through.
Thus, several questions are to be addressed in regards to the afterlife and the
individuals that take action in it, we will see how the environment influences the
characters in the five short stories. For this, an in-depth analysis of the setting will be
necessary to understand the literary techniques put to use, as well as the themes put
forward. How are these characters presented and in what manner does their deceased
state affect the narrative? We will also attempt to bring about a general reflection on
the literary genres at play in this corpus: What does the thanatographical genre imply
in the context of the afterlife. Moreover, what do these short ‘narratives-from-beyond’
say about the fantastic genre? We will also try to highlight the means by which this
corpus presents an innovative treatment of the topics and the literary tropes at work.
In short, how does the thanatographic genre bring about a liminal afterlife setting in
which the fantastic genre challenges the preconceived notions of the afterlife?
Following this line, we will dedicate a first part of the study to prosopopeia
and the internal focalization in the five short stories that allows the thanatographic
writing to present an innovative treatment of the deceased characters in this corpus
that suffer throughout their journey in the afterlife. A second part will then reveal how
the fractured representation of the protagonists mirrors the heterotopic afterlife
settings they are suffering from due to the literary technique of de-familiarization and
the liminal nature of the environment. Finally, this borderline afterlife space will
bring about frightening religious notions of life after death such as hell and
damnation, only to have them debunked by the triumph of the fantastic genre as an
alternative to the afterlife experience Christianity imposes on modern society.
* * *
7 Falconer, Rachel. Hell In Contemporary Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.
9
I) THANATOGRAPHIC WRITING
In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost.
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno
A) THANATOGRAPHY This first part of the analysis of the corpus will deal with the notion of
thanatography previously discussed in the introduction. Coined by the French
philosopher Jacques Derrida, the term ‘auto-thanatography’8 was originally used to
describe the literary phenomenon in which when dealing with an autobiography, one
is automatically led to deal with the subsequent treatment of death (thanatos) as the
counterpart of the narrative of life. Derrida believed that in each literary account of a
writers’ own life, a reflection on death could also be found. In this sense, the notion of
‘auto-thanatography’ has often been paraphrased as “the writing of one’s own death”9
and interpreted as the writers’ melancholy drives.10
Derrida’s notion of auto-thanatography has evolved since it was introduced
and today it has taken on a far more literal definition. Indeed, contemporary auto-
thanatographies are actual tales from the afterlife, told by the dead themselves. Alice
Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, a novel that tells the story of a dead teenage girl looking
down at the world of the living as her murder is solved, stands as one of the most
memorable instances of the genre. The corpus at hand has the discriminating
characteristic of depicting its characters in the afterlife, a place radically opposed to
the world of the living, and thus carries out Derrida’s literary reflection on the writing
of death. The characters in the corpus are then, for the most part, deceased, and the
reader is invited on a journey through the afterlife. However, this primary analysis
will focus on the construction of the thanatographic narrative devices at work in the
corpus, rather then on the issues of the afterlife as a constructed space.
8 Derrida, Jacques. Otobiographies: L’enseignement de Nietzche et la politique du nom proper. Paris: Galilée, 1984. 9 Deanda, Elena. “On Joy, Death, And Writing: From Autobiography To Autothanatography In Clarice Lispector's Works”. Working Papers in Romance Languages Vol. 1. No. 1 (2006): n. pag. Web. 4 Sept. 2015. 10 Bennett, Alice. “Unquiet spirits: death writing in contemporary fiction”. Textual Practice, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2009) : 463-479.
10
1) Modes and Voices of the Narrative Entity It is important to initially state that all five short stories that constitute this
corpus present the same narrative characteristics that can be described using Gérard
Genette’s terminology 11, as an extra-hetero-diegetic narration, i.e., third person
narratives in which the narrator is not a character in the diegesis. However, the
distancing effect created by the narrative voice is largely balanced out by the use of
internal focalization from the perspective of various deceased protagonists. This mode
of focalization allows the reader to have a direct insight into the main characters’
feelings and train of thought post mortem. In “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What
It Is In French”, for example, the main character’s stream of consciousness is
delivered to the reader through series of recollections of the past and reactions to the
environment. Another short story, “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band”, even
narrates the protagonist’s dream visions, embedding different layers of internal
insight. Internal focalization creates an effect of literary identification, with which the
readers of the stories find themselves identifying with the deceased protagonists
through the insightful account of their emotions and actions. In each of the stories
internal focalization is associated with one character in particular in order to enhance
the process of identification.
Furthermore, to support the internal focalisation’s rendering of the different
characters’ thought processes, yet another narrative device is summoned. The
narrative voice makes use of free indirect speech to limit the distance established
between the characters and the reader. In “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is
In French” the italics used in the text point to the words that Carol hears in her head
and that she herself is unable to make sense of: “Floyd, what’s that over there? Oh
shit. The man’s voice speaking these words was vaguely familiar, but the words
themselves were just a disconnected snip of dialogue, the kind of thing you heard
when you were channel surfing with the remote.” (402, 416) The reader receives this
piece of dialogue in the same manner it reaches Carol; without any further
information on the context of enunciation. Free indirect speech is a way for the
narrator to insert snips of dialogue into the narration, thus blurring the distinction
between to two for the reader. The use of internal focalization on the afterlife
characters and free indirect speech to transmit their thoughts establishes a link
11 Genette, Gérard. Figures III. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972.
11
between the protagonists and the reader, facilitating the readers’ interest in the
deceased character.
2) The Trope of Prosopopeia Bearing in mind the thanatographic nature of the corpus under study, it is
mandatory to pay special attention to the main literary figures of speech in the texts.
Here again, we turn to characterization and the choice of putting in action deceased
characters. This characteristic of the corpus makes of prosopopeia the dominating
figure of speech. Prosopopeia is defined firstly as “a figure of speech in which an
abstract thing is personified” and furthermore as the “figure of speech in which an
imagined, absent, or dead person or thing is represented as speaking.”12 This figure of
the-voice-from-beyond is present in all five short stories under study and manifests
itself in over twenty different characters. Each short story displays at least two dead
characters speaking from the afterlife, contributing to the polyphonic mode of
thanatographic story-telling. From a narrative point of view, the corpus is not true to
the strict contemporary definition of auto-thanatography due to the lack of a homo-
diegetic narrator. However, these short stories make up for this lack of a first-person
narrative with the internal focalization on deceased characters and an omniscient
narrator. This allows us to treat these five stories as the very character-driven
thanatographic literary corpus that it is. The writing of death is first and foremost
constructed through speech; with the figure of prosopopeia and the account of the
main characters’ speech and thoughts. Let’s turn to the manner in which the narrative
renders the experience of life after death.
B) THE JOURNEY OF THE DEAD
1) A New Kind of Ghost Fiction The importance of the narration of the experience of death is the reason why we begin
with a study of characterization and the narrative stategy that lies behind it. All five
short stories could be characterized as examples of ghost fiction, but the genre is
revisited and presented to the reader from a different perspective. Originally, ghost
fiction was produced by gothic writers, such as Walpole with The Castle of Otranto 12 "Prosopopoeia - Definition Of Prosopopoeia In English From The Oxford Dictionary". Oxforddictionaries.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 12 Feb. 2016.
12
and Anne Radcliffe with The Mysteries of Udolpho, in narratives focused on the
effect that ghosts would have on the world of the living. Indeed, the trope at that time
was that of haunted spaces such as castles and forests discovered and explored by
living characters. The actual ghosts were “non-characters”13 that had no real acting
part and almost never spoke. Later, a shift in literature was brought by Edgar Allan
Poe; his fascination with death and its rituals made the gothic genre take a turn
towards a new level of terror. This topic is best exposed in Poe’s well-known short
fiction, for example with tales of deceased wives haunting their husbands such as
“Ligeia”. This kind of gothic characterization of ghosts would give little importance
to prosopopeia, contrary to King’s tales of the dead in which we find that the ‘ghosts’
not only speak, but are in fact the protagonists of the stories. “Willa”, for example,
tells the story of ghosts that roam the world of the living after their death by train
accident. In this story, what is central to the plot is the ghost’s experience of death,
not their interaction with the living. This is made clear to the reader by the internal
focalization of the narrative voice and the prosopopeic voice-from-beyond. Indeed,
“Willa” can be described as a contemporary version of ghost fiction, one that focuses
on the experience of afterlife for the dead characters, not for the ones that are alive.
The fact that David and Willa, the deceased protagonists, go about in the world of the
living is trivialized in the plot: “He thought they [the ghosts14] would stay here now,
and that from time to time people would see them. 26 might even get a reputation for
being haunted, but probably not; people didn’t think about ghosts much while they
were drinking, unless they were drinking alone” (38). King sets the focus of the five
stories on the deceased characters and more importantly on the way they go about in
the new environment they inhabit. We can see how the reader’s identification with the
deceased characters is accentuated by this trivialization of the interaction between the
world of the living and the afterlife.
Another literary device put to use to underline the importance of the deceased
characters in thanatography is the “psychological” descriptions that King makes of
these. If we consider the characters of the corpus overall, it could be said that they are
made to appear unwell both mentally and physically. Their suffering is described
throughout the stories in an effort to create an emotional response in the reading 13 The term “non-character” is borrowed from Alice Bennett’s article “Unquiet spirits : death writing in contemporary fiction”. She used it to describe the same type of haunting ghost characters we are analyzing. 14 Added from the original text for comprehension purposes.
13
audience. For example, the bureaucrat from the short story “Afterlife” is described in
the following terms: “Harris looks tired. Harris looks bored” (197). Similarly, the
secondary characters in “Willa” are presented as being somewhat bored: “people
either strolled aimlessly or simply sat on benches under the fluorescent lights. The
shoulders of the ones who sat had that special slump you saw only in places like this,
where people waited for whatever had gone wrong to be made right” (8). We can see
that in two very different settings, the characters seem to experience the same torment
of waiting for something that never comes and not having any occupations to
entertain themselves while they do so. Furthermore, some of the characters in the
corpus experience physical discomfort such as hunger and thirst in the afterlife, as is
the case of James in “Afterlife” who says: “Mostly what I’d like is some water. I’d
kill for a cold bottle of Dasani.” (102) Each of the characters in this corpus suffers in
some way whether from physical or “psychological” ailments, encouraging to reader
to respond to suffering as well. There is a reversal in the mode of writing ghost fiction
as the non-character haunting-ghost is replaced in King’s fiction by the “haunted
ghost” protagonist that pains to overcome the struggles of the afterlife.
In order to reinforce the reader’s immersion in the account of the afterlife
experience, these five tales of the dead appear to be told in real time only a few
instants after the characters have died. The tales begin shortly after the characters
have died if not a little before the time of death such as in the case of “Afterlife”. The
afterlife stories begin in medias res, immersing the reader in a story already in motion.
“You Know They Got a Hell Of a Band” is particular in the sense that the story starts
out with a couple of living characters, Mary and Clark, that come across a mysterious
town called Rock and Roll Heaven in which the inhabitants are all dead American
celebrities and musicians of the 1960s. By the end of the story, Mary and Clark come
to the realization that they will never leave Rock and Roll Heaven, and that it very
well might be hell. The story’s excipit hints at the fact that the initial characters are
somehow dead by association with the town, without having really died in the
traditional fashion: “when she took Clark’s hand it was like taking the hand of a
corpse” (417). Other deceased characters of the corpus could be described as fairly
classical, such as those present in “Willa”, in the sense that they are dead from the
beginning of the story until the end. Three out of five of the stories that constitute this
corpus do not explicitly indicate, in the incipit, that the characters are deceased.
14
The sense of immediacy conveyed by the fact that the narrative is set so close to the
time of death is enhanced by the use of the present tense in “Afterlife” and “The New
York Times at Special Bargain Rates”. The first sentence of the latter reads: “She’s
fresh out of the shower when the phone begins to ring, but although the house is still
full of relatives – she can hear them downstairs, it seems they will never go away, it
seems she never had so many – no one picks up” (99). On the one hand, the use of
this tense creates a strong narrative immersion for the reader, and on the other hand it
creates a link between the characters and the readers due to the fact that they are put
on the same ground and have the same knowledge of what is happening. Thus, the
corpus presents a series of deceased protagonists that are atypical; on the one hand
due to their central role in the plot and, on the other, due to the extensive
psychological and emotional profile Stephen King allows them to have which creates
an identifiable account of the afterlife for the readers. The narrative unfolds in what
seems to be real time, allowing the audience to synchronize, once again, their
reactions to the plot with that of the characters.
2) Passing on to the Afterlife These stories can be described as stories of passage, from the world of the
living to the afterlife. “A half-moon rose between two peaks and sat there, casting a
sickroom glow over this stretch of the highway and the open land on both sides of it”
(10). As we can see from this landscape quotation from “Willa”, the subject matter at
hand is the “stretch of highway” which appears to be central to the scenery. A binary
structure emerges from the scene through the use of expressions such as “half moon
rose between the two peaks” and “the open land on both sides of it”. These images
depict symmetry in the landscape that highlights the central axis that is the
“highway”. The overall plot of the corpus consists of characters passing on to the
afterlife and what happens to them once they are dead. The journey of the dead as a
narrative trope is conveyed throughout these stories by actual modes of transportation.
In fact, all but one of the deaths occurred in a train, a car, or an airplane and all five
narratives are shrouded with the lexical field of transportation and displacement. This
metaphorization of the passage from life to death mirrors some of the modern clichés
in popular culture that are attached to death such as the “train to heaven” or the
“highway to hell”. The image of displacement is another element of narration that sets
15
the emphasis on characterization. The reader is led to follow the characters along their
difficult post-mortem journey. Furthermore, we can also note that the characters are
also lost in their travels. James from “The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates”
is in a place that reminds him of Grand Central station and where “there are doors
going everywhere” (102), only he says to his wife: “I don’t know which door to use”
(103). “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band’”s very first sentence is “When Mary
woke up, they were lost” (1). Later on in the story, being lost will eventually lead the
couple to their death. During this journey from life to the afterlife, the characters have
to face their condition in a post mortem state of confusion. These five short stories
could be described as travel narratives, for most of the characters continue in death
the journey they were on instants before they died. Thus, the reader is led to
accompany the protagonists through this journey, as well as to contemplate along with
them the frightening topic of death and the question of what comes after it.
3) Confronting Death As we have already established, the journey the characters are on is one filled
with hardship and suffering. Due to the fact that these stories are told so soon after the
passing of these disturbed characters, we get to see how they react and cope with their
deaths. One could say they do so in a slow manner because, in most of the stories of
the corpus, the certainty of death is delayed until the denouement, faithful to the
tradition of short story telling. Indeed, one of the most used definitions of the short
story was given given by Poe in 1846; he describes it as “a brief tale which can be
told or read in one sitting”15. According to James Cooper Lawrence, this definition
implies two discriminating criteria to a short story: brevity and “the necessary
coherence which gives the effect of totality”. Suspense is said to be one of the writers’
many tools that allows that coherence and that effect necessary to engage the reader.16
This literary technique is used in “Willa”, “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It
Is In French”, “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band” and “The New York Times at
Special Bargain Rates”, and thus, it dominates the corpus. These stories present a
building up of the narration towards a climactic denouement that acknowledges the
reality of death. This kind of epiphany comes to the dead characters themselves (and
15 Poe, Edgar Allan. “Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews”, Library of America (1984) pp. 569-577. 16 Lawrence, James Cooper. “A Theory of the Short Story” The North American Review, Vol. 205, No. 735 (1917) pp. 274-286.
16
the readers as well) that throughout the stories are retained in a state of ignorance.
However, it is not entirely the case of “The New York Times at Special Bargain
Rates,” where it is the recently widowed character that comes to accept her husband’s
death.
In his study of the fantastic subgenre of horror and what he calls the paradox
of horror17, Noël Carroll presented his view that the nature and appeal of the horror
genre lies in the narrative structure. He believes that every horror story is constructed
around the “complex discovery plot” scheme (or a variation of this structure) that
consists of four parts: the onset of the plot, the discovery of the supernatural being or
event, the confirmation of its existence and finally the confrontation between good
and evil (humans and monsters). Carroll’s theory can be applied to the five short
stories for, even if there are no horrific monsters in the corpus, the narrative structure
is constructed so as to build up suspense and curiosity for the reader, until the
denouement, which in these stories serves the purpose of the confirmation of life after
death. Carroll goes as far as to assert that the anticipation of the denouement is the
only valid reason as to why a person would subject oneself to being horrified.
In the same spirit as the “complex discovery plot” theory, another literary tool
known as the cliffhanger is employed in this corpus. Designed to leave the reader
wanting more information, the cliffhanger adds to the stories’ mystery before death is
revealed and thus fulfills Poe’s requirements of coherence and effect. It is present
mostly in “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French” where the narrative
is constructed into a climax several times, and each time is left hanging as Carol
suddenly wakes up from what appears to be a dream. After each one of these fractures
in the story, the narration is brought back to the initial incipit scheme, on the one hand
delaying the final revelation and on the other creating a feeling of curiosity and
suspense in the reading audience. But if the realization is delayed in such manner, it is
not just to appeal to the reader’s curiosity on a structural level. On a diegetic level, we
see that the characters appear to have no other choice than to ignore their state, for the
journey of death is presented as a brutalizing ritual of the senses that does not allow a
clear understanding of the situation.
Characterization is put to the service of the plot for it is the characters’
17 Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy Of Horror, Or, Paradoxes Of The Heart. New York: Rootledge, 1990. p. 99-158. Noel Carroll uses the expression “the paradox of horror” to refer to the question of why would people read horror fiction if being horrified is in itself an unpleasant experience.
17
difficult experience in the afterlife that dictates the narrative structure of the five short
stories. The denouement of the plot is delayed until the very end of each story, thus
prolonging the hardship both the characters and the readers have to endure.
C) A BRUTALIZING RITE OF PASSAGE
1) The Character’s Uncertainty and Denial Indeed, confusion reigns over the characters present in this corpus, making the
afterlife experience difficult to accept as a reality. One example already considered is
that of the widower Annie in “The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates”, whose
disbelief at her husband’s death leads her to hopeful speculation and even
aggravation. In the beginning, “her first confused thought is that he must have missed
the plane in London, even though he called her from Heathrow not long before it took
off” (100), ignoring all the facts that make it impossible for her husband to still be
alive. This denial later leads to frustration as she is confronted with reality and
declares: “But I don’t understand!” (100) The main character in “Afterlife”, Bill
Anderson, also seems to be uncertain concerning his state of being as we can see from
the beginning of the narration after he has passed away: “He’s wearing the pajamas he
died in (at least he assumes he died)” (190). The characters of the corpus experience
disbelief with several different degrees of intensity: Bill for example is close to Annie
in the sense that they are mostly confused, while other characters are much more
oblivious and go as far as to deny their situation.
Denial is very present in both “Willa” and “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band”,
where David keeps repeating, “We’re not lost” with “the voice of a man who still
believes he is dreaming” (413). In “Willa”, it is the secondary characters that are the
most in denial, some of them even turn to violence in a desperate attempt to silence
those who speak out the truth: “She seemed about to say something more, but before
she could, her mother suddenly slapped her across the face hard enough to expose her
teeth in a momentary sneer and drive spit from the corner of her mouth” (34). The
confusion that reigns over the characters creates doubt in the reader as well; are the
characters really dead or will there be a turn of events? The reading contract could
then appear to be broken by the ambivalence of the text and the uncertainty of the
prosopopeic voices. However, as we said, characterization is in the service of plot in
this corpus, and the suffering of the characters of these stories is an ominous indicator
18
for the readers of the thanatographic nature of the texts. Here we find the hesitation
Tzvetan Todorov spoke of when describing the Fantastic genre.18 The characters, as
well as the readers, are unsure of what can be considered a certainty and what is not.
2) The Loss of Memory Along the same line as the discomforting hesitation experienced due to what
appears to be an account of afterlife, the characters are presented as having some
intellectual and even physical disabilities that adds considerable difficulties to their
understanding of the situation. The first of these disabilities is the inexplicable loss of
memory experienced by several characters. Mary and Carol, from “You Know They
Got a Hell of a Band” and “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French”,
both experience the same kind of amnesia; these two women cannot seem to
remember their dreams. Mary dreams about a jukebox that is filled with human
organs and blood, and in her case this nightmare could have had a premonitory
function and perhaps could have steered her and her husband away from Rock and
Roll Heaven where they find a jukebox similar to the one that announces death in
Mary’s dream. It is part of Stephen King’s narrative strategy to insert dream visions in
the narrative so as to diffuse and prolong the hesitation concerning the outcome of the
stories. In “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French”, the situation is
similar for Carol that, as we have seen previously, experiences several ‘nightmarish
visions’ that could have helped her understand what is happening. The first time Carol
wakes up from what is described as “a nightmare” (412), she is asked about the
contents of her dream and answers: “I don’t remember” (412). It is only the second
time that she has almost exactly the same nightmare that she understands that she is
not dreaming but is, in fact, dead. In both cases, the loss of memory serves the
purpose of delaying the character’s realization of his/her state, thus maintaining the
narration in an initial state of confusion.
On a slightly different note, we also encounter characters that forget linguistic
elements of speech as a result of the loss of memory. It is particularly the case of
Harris, the manager in “Afterlife”, who is unable to remember correctly the name of
the protagonist, William Andrews and keeps calling him “Anderson”. More than just
a symptom of the character’s trauma, Harris’s speech impediment poses the question
18 See page 31.
19
of the characters’ general lack of communication skills. These characters could be
considered as the mirror image of the reader, who also might struggle to read the
ambivalent messages the texts send.
3) The Loss of Language Skills Ever since Ferdinand de Saussure’s teachings were posthumously published in
1916, the field of linguistics has embraced the dichotomy of speech and language. In
his terms, this dichotomy can be further explained as the distinction between the
acoustic image of a word, the “signifier”, and the concept behind it called the
“signified” 19 Understanding the nature of these concepts and their arbitrary
relationship comes naturally to any person whose physical and intellectual abilities to
communicate have not been tampered with. It is not the case of the characters present
in this corpus, since they seem to be lacking both of these human faculties. Different
types of impaired communication can be found in the corpus, which correspond to
lower and higher degrees of disability in the subjects and in the modes of enunciation.
In “The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates”, Anne receives a telephone call
from her husband who is in an afterlife setting, and she describes this communication
as a “non-connection” (104). By saying this, the character points to the fact that
however ordinary the conversation may appear, the deadly nature of it only
accentuates the distances that separates the living from the dead, making it impossible
to even speak of a connection whatsoever. Indeed, communication is hard to establish
in the short stories at hand, for many of the subjects are struck dumb and speechless.
In “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French”, in which the title itself
hints at a linguistic obstacle of forgetting the word “déjà-vu”, Carol “tried to scream.
Tried to scream” (412) without ever being able to. In this respect we could also quote
from “The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates”, where Annie is in the same
situation as Carol: “For a moment she can’t speak or even breathe” (99). In both
instances, it is when the characters are confronted with the reality of death that they
become mute. French philosopher Georges Gusdorf believed that speech was a human
tool to interpret the world. He said: “Le monde s’offre à chacun de nous comme un
ensemble de significations dont nous n’obtenons la révélation qu’au niveau de la
19 Saussure, Ferdinand de et al. Cours De Linguistique Générale. Paris: Payot, 1995.
20
parole. Le langage, c’est le réel.”20 If language is indeed reality, then the lack of
language can be considered as the denial of the real world, or perhaps as the
representation of a world too unreal to describe with words. When we transpose this
notion to the characters of the corpus, we realize that their loss of language skills
equates with the impossibility to grasp the situation they are in. As far as the reader is
concerned, this impossibility to embrace reality becomes the essence of suspense and
anticipation built in the narratives. We are dealing here with the issue of literary
language through the topic of broken communication, as is the genre of thanatography
through the figure of the voice of the dead; prosopopeia. It is indeed the figure of
speech adequate to characterize the impossibility of the living to communicate with
the dead. It is also necessary for such stories that wish to depict a vivid afterlife
experience for the reader.
4) The Loss of Vision Likewise, the reader’s vision is subjected to the failing vision of the
characters. The final impairment that the process of dying has imposed on these
deceased travelers concerns their ability to see. The character’s loss of vision implies
two things; not being able so see what is around them and consequently, not knowing
that they are dead. This characteristic of the corpus can be found in “Willa”, for
example, its first sentence being: “You don’t see what’s right in front of your eyes”
(7), a sentence that Willa repeats to David three times in the story. A semantic field of
sight is scattered throughout this narrative and it mostly concerns sight being
impaired: “At first he couldn’t read the two lines at the bottom at all; at first those two
lines were just incomprehensible symbols, possibly because his mind, which wanted
to believe none of this, could find no innocuous translation” (30). Here we clearly see
how losing the physical capacity of vision is linked to the denial of one’s death. Other
short stories such as “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French” and
“You Know They Got a Hell of a Band” also present the same premise of delaying
the climatic revelation scene by blinding the characters. It is the case of Clark, from
“You Know They Got a Hell of a Band”, who is the last to realize the hell he has
arrived in despite his wife’s warnings: “Mary kicked his ankle –hard—but Clark
20 Gusdorf, Georges. La Parole. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1986. pp. 37-38.
21
didn’t seem to notice. He was staring at the redhead21 again, and now his mouth was
hung on a spring” (10). The characters’ ability to reason through sight is here
annihilated by the very ghost that threatens his life, leaving him no choice but to stay
oblivious to danger. The character’s loss of memory, speech and vision are examples
of how characterization is used to serve the purpose of the plot, that is to say, the
purpose of instilling in the reader the desire for the denouement. The impairment of
the human capacity to reason through memory, speech and the senses enhances the
initial state of confusion for the characters and subsequently for the readers. It
eventually leads to a total loss of control over the situation: “she could do nothing”
(418) as it is said about Carol in “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In
French”.
These five thanatographic narratives are the stories of tormented and fragmented
characters rationally experiencing what seems like irrational situations of life after
death. Their senses have been impaired throughout this brutalizing journey to the
afterlife in order to delay their understanding of reality and thus the reader’s
understanding of the plot. We will now take a closer look at the elements that are
external to the semi-auto-thanatographical tales and their protagonists by focusing on
the various settings of the narratives. What it is about the environment that allows
such fractured narratives?
II) A LIMINAL PLACE IN SPACE AND TIME
Through me you go into a city of weeping; through me you go into eternal pain; through
me you go amongst the lost people ― Dante Alighieri, Inferno
It is crucial to study the afterlife setting in which the characters take action in
order to fully understand the state they are in. The setting and the characters are often
interrelated in literature, for one influences the other, as it does in real life. In the
corpus under study, Stephen King makes use of the trope of prosopopeia to explore
different backdrops that could be appropriate for an evocation of the afterlife, and he 21 « the redhead » is actually the corpse of Janis Joplin, animated by the town of Rock and Roll Heaven, Mary has already identified her and is seeking to get away from that place.
22
is supported by the very format of his narratives. It is said that the short story allows
little character development and privileges the elements of setting on account of its
length22. However, we have seen how in this corpus, Stephen King puts an emphasis
on issues of characterization in order to obtain a gripping narrative structure. The
following study will aim at analysing how the setting for these five short stories is
constructed and the effect these complex and liminal frameworks have on the
narration.
A) THE AFTERLIFE SETTING: Sitting in Limbo
1) A Place that Looks Like Hell Seeing that the general setting of the corpus is the afterlife, and knowing
Stephen King’s inclinations for horror and terror, one could expect that the setting
would actually be hell. Rightfully so, the word “hell” is mentioned in several of the
five stories; more than three times in “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band”, where
the title itself implicitly alludes to an afterlife hellish scenario, and once in “Afterlife”.
Interestingly, Stephen King himself describes “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What
It Is In French”, as a hell narrative in the 2002 Scribner edition of the short story
collection Everything’s Eventual23: I think the story is about Hell. A version of it where you are condemned to do the same thing over and over again. Existentialism, baby, what a concept; paging Albert Camus. (423)
Here, King makes an explicit statement about what could only have been the readers’
personal conclusion for the story never certifies that the narrative takes place in hell.
King also comments on the short story “Afterlife” in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams24 ,
but this time, he does not pronounce himself on the interpretation of the story. He
merely presents all of the well know societal speculations about the afterlife such as
“heaven, hell, purgatory and reincarnation”25 (187), and introduces the short story by
telling the reader what he would want the afterlife to be:
22 Lawrence, James Cooper. « A Theory of the Short Story ». The North American Review, Vol. 205, No. 735 (1917): 274- 286. 23 King, Stephen. Everything's Eventual. New York: Scribner, 2002. Stephen King commented the theme of hell in an explanatory paragraph printed right after the short story’s end. 24 King, Stephen. The Bazaar Of Bad Dreams. New York: Scribner, 2015. However, this explanatory paragraph was presented before the short story. 25 King, Stephen. The Bazaar Of Bad Dreams. New York: Scribner, 2015. pp. 187
23
What I’d like – I think – is a chance to go through it all again, as a kind of immersive movie […] This story isn’t about such a rerun – not exactly – but musing about the possibility led me to write about one man’s afterlife. (187)
This particular story does not deal with the theme of hell, but as we can see from this
quote, hell is still present in the collective imagination when dealing with the topic of
the afterlife. The stories that have not been mentioned this far do not allude
linguistically to the concept of hell but do represent it symbolically.
Overall in the corpus, the concept of death and hell is furthermore supported
by the trope of the ‘descent narrative’. The notion of the descent narrative was
thoroughly exposed by the literary critic Rachel Falconer in 2005 in a book26 where
she analyses literary works about literal or symbolic descents into hell. These stories
range from the fantastic genre to realism, portraying characters that are alive as well
as deceased. The themes of the descent narrative are however all the same: hardship
and suffering in hellish conditions. One of the most memorable instances of the genre
of the descent narrative is Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, in which he describes his
journey through hell, purgatory and paradise as a metaphorical journey towards God.
The descent narrative scheme is very present in the corpus under study (especially in
“That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French”, “Willa” and “You Know
They Got a Hell of a Band”) and a general downward movement enhances it. This
movement is conveyed by the modes of aerial transportation crashing from the sky in
“Afterlife” and “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French”, and trains
falling from cliffs in the case of “Willa”. The characters in “You Know They Got a
Hell of a Band” also experience a descent for they are going “down the road” as they
approach Rock and Roll Heaven, even though it is only symbolically their cause of
death. This descent leads the characters to the town and consequently to a hellish
afterlife in which they are trapped in suffering.
In this same short story, Mary and Clark are also said to be trapped by their
natural environment as they head towards their doom: “with the piney woods pressing
in close enough on both sides to keep the patched tar in constant shadow” (373). A
sense of claustrophobia emerges from this hellish natural landscape, foreshadowing
the couple’s unfortunate destiny in Rock and Roll Heaven. In “Afterlife”, the tortured
character Isaac Harris also experiences entrapment in his afterlife for he is confined to
26 Falconer, Rachel. Hell In Contemporary Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.
24
the office he used to work in when he was alive, surrounded by “files […] pilled two
feet high” (192). It is clear that the subjects of these stories are suffering from their
condition, but, as we can see, the fact that they are in hell is not presented as a
certainty. The question of what and where is the afterlife is crucial to the development
of the plot, as well as it is the general appeal of the thanatographic genre. King
delivers with this corpus a thrilling approach to said genre by avoiding any clear and
final response to the readers’ interrogations.
2) A Heterotopic Liminal Space Indeed, if we take a closer look at the context of the occurrences of the word
“hell”, we realize that the term does not quite define the actual settings of the stories.
For example, James from the short fiction “The New York Times at Special Bargain
Rates” is unable to identify the place where he is when he says: “I don’t exactly know
where I am” (100). In the same sense, William Andrews cannot clearly identify his
location after he has passed away: “When the brilliance dims, he’s not in heaven or
hell. He’s in a hallway. He supposed it could be purgatory” (190). This uncertainty
concerning the setting in which these characters go about reflects the liminal nature of
the setting. The last quote from “Afterlife” mentions both heaven and hell, but more
importantly it posits the notion of purgatory. Purgatory is commonly associated with
the catholic dogmas of life after death as an in-between place in the afterlife, but it is
not where our characters are either. Truly, ‘in-betweenness’ is the predominant trope
in the corpus at hand, not purgatory or hell. This liminal space has no name and refers
to no known afterlife setting, but reminds us of Michel Foucault’s notion of
heterotopia27. Composed of the prefix hetero which in ancient Greek (ἕτερος) means
"other” or “different” and the Greek morphemes οὐ meaning "not" and τόπος,
meaning "place", it can globally be defined as a "no-place". It is a space where the
accepted rules of society do not apply because the subjects evolving in it are ‘neither
here, nor there’, but rather in a place that refers only to the otherness of imagination.
This imaginary bordeline space can also be considered as an intermediary place in
which the characters are not really meant to stay. This idea is supported by the trope
of travelling formerly mentioned, that implies there is still more displacement to
come. The deceased character James in “The New York Times at Special Bargain
27 Foucault, Michel. "Des Espaces Autres". 1967. Lecture.
25
Rates” confirms this assumption when he says: “But there’s no sense staying here”
(103). James appears to be in a transitional place and is surrounded by other deceased
characters that have already left this liminal setting by crossing the threshold of the
train station by means of the doors present in this place. All of these ambiguous
descriptions of the afterlife setting hint at the fact that there are still unknown and
unspoken elements to the afterlife. They fail to satisfy the readers’ desire for answers
and instead, place them in the very same in-betweenness the characters are subjected
to.
The notion of the liminal space is furthermore supported by physical liminal
states in the characters themselves: The following quotation from “That Feeling, You
Can Only Say What It Is In French” exemplifies this at best: “all at once you realize
you’re edging out of the land of fun and into the Kingdom of Nausea” (414). Here, we
get a sense of liminality by the use of the verb “edging” which contains the word
‘edge’ understood as a limit or a border. The character, in this case Carol from “That
Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French”, is said to be passing from one
place, “the land of fun”, to another, “the Kingdom of Nausea”. These two elements
are explicitly described as geographical spaces (“land”, “kingdom”) and thus serve as
metaphor for the characters’ state of transition in the corpus. The fact that these places
they occupy appear foggy and liminal is due to the ambivalent imagery that is
attached to its description. Indeed, the narrative representation of the different settings
of the corpus is shrouded with discrepancies that allow us to consider it as a new kind
of heterotopic landscape of the afterlife. Heterotopias abide by six defining principles,
one of them being its ability to juxtapose in its space several other places that would
be incompatible in a real-life scenario. The discrepancies in the description of the
settings in this corpus correspond to this partial definition of heterotopia as a place
where opposing elements coexist. Indeed, we notice that the texts are shrouded with
visual and temporal discrepancies that aim at de-familiarizing the characters, causing
them further confusion and suffering.
26
B) VISUAL AND TEMPORAL DISCREPANCIES: A Sensory Defamiliarization
1) The Familiarization with a Foreign Environment: Confusion However, in order to make the characters’ de-familiarization within this
liminal space have the most impact and effect, first they undergo a process of (false)
familiarization with their surroundings. In this sense, one can begin by mentioning the
presence of well-know figures whose faces the protagonists are familiar with, such as
celebrities in two of our short stories; “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band” and
“Afterlife”. In the first of these two, the main characters arrive in a town where all of
the inhabitants are deceased celebrities from the music scene of the 1950s and 1960s.
Amongst these are Elvis Presley performing the role of the town sheriff, Janis Joplin
as a waitress and Ricky Nelson as the cook, only to mention a few. The second story,
Afterlife, also attempts to familiarize the main character28 by including in his afterlife
experience a picture on the wall portraying the faces of people he met during his life,
as well as recognizable celebrities: “The guy in the joke toque is Ronald Reagan”
(191), says the narrative voice with a comical tone. This familiarization of the
characters with their environment is extended to the scenery as well, which means
that the characters are reminded of things they knew from their past life in the new
and unknown landscapes of the afterlife. It is the case in “You Know They Got a Hell
of a Band” where the familiar setting reminds the characters of “Norman Rockwell’s
painting illustrations […] of Currier and Ives” or even “The Peculiar Little Town in
Twilight Zone” (181). These two last elements of familiarization respectively
introduce contradictory reactions to the narrative of the liminal afterlife panorama; on
the one hand creating a comforting feeling of familiarity (with the picturesque
depiction of America) and on the other, generating a sense of unease (coveyed by the
reference to the liminal Twilight Zone) due to the impossibility of this transgression
of the ‘real life’ in the afterlife.
To accentuate the characters’ and the readers’ unsettling sense of familiarization,
King makes use of descriptive realism and verisimilitude. In an attempt to represent
familiar things as they truly are and with detail, King delivers a physical and sensory
description of the scenery. He relies on the senses that have not been impaired by the
28 Naturally, the reader is also the object of this familiarization through his identification with the characters and their sensations and feelings.
27
rite of dying (the sense of sight for example) to convey realism in the narrative. These
physical experiences can manifest themselves through hunger for those who are dead
and do get hungry such as James from “The New York Times at Special Rates”, and
hearing and smell for the rest of the deceased characters in “Willa” and “You Know
They Got a Hell of a Band”. “The smells of beer, sweat, Brut, and Wal-Mart perfume
hit him like a punch in the nose” (17), here we can see how David experiences a
strong and violent (“punch”) physical reaction to a sensory experience related to
scent. David has not yet realized that he is dead, so this kind of realistic sensory
experience serves as an anchor to his belief that he is alive and physically present in
the honky-tonk. Sensory experiences establish a connection between the characters
and the environment as in “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band” where Mary
realizes the danger she and her husband are facing and seeks a way to compose
herself:
Still pressing her crossed toes tightly together, she picked up the napkin the waitress had left, wanting to feel its texture – it was another connection to the world and another way to break the panicky, irrational […] feeling which had gripped her so strongly. (394)
For Mary, establishing physical contact with the napkin is a reassuring gesture that is
in contrast with the metaphorical grip that panic has got on her. She paradoxically
wishes to be re-connected to “the world” that threatens her, in an effort to cope with
reality. We can see how sensory experience is put to use in this corpus to give a sense
of false reality to the characters. This is done so with the same intent as the
familiarization of the characters to the afterlife environment, in order to better de-
familiarize them and the reader.
The final literary tool used to familiarize the characters with the unknown
environment is analepsis. Several of the characters in this corpus experience
flashbacks of their childhood and adulthood while they are in the afterlife. In fact,
analepsis is present in all five short stories that constitute this study’s corpus. Here is
an example of one of Carol’s recollections from “That Feeling, You Can Only Say
What It Is In French”:
She had worn it, all right. At Our Lady of Angels grammar and middle school she had worn it, then at St. Vincent de Paul high. She wore the medal until breasts grew around it like ordinary miracles,
28
and then someplace, probably on the class trip to Hampton Beach, she had lost it. […] Mary on that long-gone medallion and Mary on this billboard had exactly the same look, the one that made you feel guilty of thinking impure thoughts even when all you were thinking about was a peanut-butter sandwich. (406)
As we can see this analeptic episode establishes a correspondence between life and
death by the means of the Mary medallion, blurring the already imprecise lines Carol
uses to divide her life from her afterlife. Placing life memories in the afterlife setting
causes a sense of familiarization in the characters that recognize elements of their
lives in a setting that has never before been encountered. Several other stories
deconstruct the chronological order of events by embedding into the main narrative
stories of the characters’ life. The effect is double for it creates ambivalence and
confusion both for the characters and for the reader, making it hard to distinguish the
past from the present.
2) The Trope of Defamiliarization In order to maximize the state of in-betweenness, after the familiarization with
the unknown territory of the afterlife comes the de-familiarization with this same
environment that becomes increasingly strange and threatening. The following
quotation offers an accurate definition of the literary trope that is predominantly at
work in this corpus. Originally coined by Victor Shlovsky in 191729, the notion of
defamiliarization was originally employed to describe the artifacts used in literature to
create a strong impression on the reader. This reflection on the processes of literary
interpretation sparked by the use of the defamiliarization technique has been carried
out in recent studies in a manner that truly echoes the literary techniques at work in
these five stories: Defamiliarization of that which is or has become familiar or taken for granted, hence automatically perceived, is the basic function of all devices. And with defamiliarization come both the slowing down and the increased difficulty (impeding) of the process of reading
29 Shklovsky, Victor. « Art as Technique ». Russian Formalist Criticism: four essays. Translated and with an Introduction by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press: 1965. “The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important. (Shklovsky 12)
29
and comprehending and an awareness of the artistic procedures (devices) causing them.30
This definition of defamiliarization, similar to that of Shlovsky, supports our idea that
this trope is utilized to delay the moment when the characters finally understand that
they are dead, for it posits the belief that defamiliarization adds difficulties to the
comprehension of a given diegetic situation. We can also affirm that in this corpus,
seeing as the reader only detains the information that the characters have themselves,
defamiliarization is extended outside of the diegesis and also concerns the people
interpreting the literary text.
The protagonists of the stories experience a feeling of unease upon perceiving the
liminality of the environment. In “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band”, the setting
is described as “simultaneously unreal and too real” and also as “so similar… but so
different, too” (388). The logical connectors “and” and “but” testify to the duality of
the landscape that contrasts what is recognizable and familiar with what is new and
appears “unreal”. This creates a sense of displacement for the characters that is
intensified in a gradual manner as the following quote suggests: “a growing sense of
dislocation” (192). Similarly, when Carol (from “That Feeling, You Can Only Say
What It Is In French”) begins to recover the comprehension abilities she lost to
defamiliarization, she realizes that something is wrong with the feelings she is
experiencing: “It’s just too strong, not normal” (415). She also starts noticing the
discrepancies and abnormalities in the props of the setting: “She looked at the
speedometer and saw it was calibrated not in miles an hour but thousands of feet”
(419). What was at first abnormal, such as a very strong sense of déjà-vu, quickly
becomes an impossibility. With this last quotation, we revisit the idea that the rules of
the heterotopic afterlife are not the same as those that can be applied to life, opening a
door to a new kind of reality.
We find this notion of a new reality based on old familiar elements of the world of the
living in “The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates” with the description of this
story’s afterlife setting. James describes this environment in the following manner:
“Looks like Grand Central Station.[…] Only bigger. And emptier. As if it wasn’t
30 Margolin, Uri. Russian Formalism . The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
30
really Grand Central at all but only…mmm…a movie set of Grand Central” (102).
Recognizable aspects of the afterlife setting are gradually revealed as alternatives-
from-beyond to what they could actually be in the world of the living. The transfer
made between the world of the living and the afterlife can be considered as an
unnatural transgression, and subsequently, it is treated as something too abnormal to
be accepted as reality. Rosemary Jackson delivers a precise and insightful description
of the term “uncanny”, commonly used in literature to refer to what is strange and
unsettling. “As Freud points out, there are two levels of meaning to the German term for the uncanny, das Unheimlich. Both levels are vital for an understanding of his theory in relation to fantasy. Das Heimlich, the un-negated version, is ambivalent. On the first level of meaning, it signifies that which is homely, familiar, friendly, cheerful, comfortable, intimate. It gives a sense of being ‘at home’ in the world, and its negation therefore summons up the unfamiliar, uncomfortable, strange, alien. It produces a feeling of estrangement, of being not ‘at home’ in the world. […] Das Heimlich also means that which is concealed from others: all that is hidden, secreted, obscured. It’s negation, das Unheimlich, then functions to dis-cover, reveal, expose areas normally kept out of sight. The uncanny combines these two semantic levels: its signification lies precisely in this dualism. It uncovers what is hidden and, by doing so, effects a disturbing transformation of the familiar into the unfamiliar.” (65)31
The dual and ambivalent nature of the term ‘uncanny’ encapsulates to perfection the
literary scheme at work in this corpus. Indeed, the process of defamiliarization we
have exposed serves the same purpose as the uncanny; producing a feeling of
estrangement and the subsequent desire to “dis-cover” what hides behind the
unfamiliar.
The general trope of dislocation of familiar elements and the resulting de-
familiarization has an array of negative consequences on the characters of this corpus,
ranging from denial to liminal states, as we have already touched upon. Another of
the effects that the heterotopic and liminal environment has is that it isolates the
characters and causes them to partially lose their identities. Some of the secondary
characters in the short stories (at least two) appear to be ‘non-characters’ in the place
they occupy: Bill from “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French” is
only a product of Carol’s afterlife imagination and thus has no connection to the
afterlife world. He is the only one not to react to the discrepancies in the scenery: “the
31 Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York: Routledge, 2003
31
speedometer froze at sixteen thousand feet and then blew out, but Bill appeared not to
notice” (420). Carol is alone with her afterlife constructions, even though she can
interact and even enter a dialogue with her husband.
This makes of Carol a confused and isolated character unable to interpret the
environment due to the familiar faces and objects that surround her. The feeling of
isolation attached to the main character accentuates the reader’s identification with the
plot, for the focus of the internal focalization is set on one individual. Other characters
also suffer from isolation, such as the ones in “Willa”, a story where we can find an
exhaustive lexical field of absence and isolation. Willa herself is described as a sort of
‘absent presence’ at the beginning of the narrative: “a cry of absence, absence in the
heart” (8)32, even though she is the eponymous character of the short story. Her
physical absence at the beginning of the story and her emotional distance throughout
the story makes of her fiancé, David, an isolated character. Furthermore, everyone in
“Willa” is cut off from the world of the living, including from the animal world, as
the episode with the wolves testifies to.33 Even though the characters in “Willa” are
ghosts in the ‘real world’, the world they belonged to in their former lives is not quite
the one they are in the diegetic time, which delays their comprehension and
subsequent acceptance of their deceased state.
3) The Unsettling Time Discrepancies We have spoken of the visual and sensory discrepancies present in this corpus,
which cause the characters’ displacement in the afterlife setting. The last elements of
defamiliarization are a series of unsettling temporal discrepancies present in the text.
In this sense, the first thing we will comment on is the fact that, in several of the
stories that constitute this corpus, we do not know with certainty what date it is. For
example, in “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band”, everything is related to the
1950s decade, from the décor to the townsfolk, whereas the story takes place in times
contemporary to the time of writing. When Mary and Clark first arrive in Rock and
32 This passage is a quote from the poem “Winter Remembered” by John Crowe Ranson. The poet also uses this figure of speech to express nostalgia about a loved one that has been distanced from the subject that is speaking. However, in John Crowe Ranson’s text, the object of affection seems to be truly gone, unlike Willa, who is mostly emotionally distant. 33 In this passage of the short story, David and Willa encounter a pack of wolves on their way back to the train station. Willa, upon realizing that the wolves seem to actually see the deceased characters, tries to approach them. The pack of wolves gets absolutely frightened when they discover the true nature of the couple, and runs away from them to Willa’s great sorrow.
32
Roll Heaven, Clark comments on this discrepancy in the setting by saying: “It’s all
fifties stuff” (390). This observation will later serve the couple as a clue as to where
they have arrived and just how peculiar Rock and Roll Heaven really is. For the
person who reads these stories, the chronological discrepancies are indicators of the
fantastic nature of the texts, for it depicts sceneries too odd to be real. However, they
also serve the purpose of the readers’ defamiliarization and do not actually facilitate
the process of denouement.
Similarly, the main character in “Afterlife” finds himself confused due to the many
contradictory indications concerning the date. In Isaac Harris’ office a calendar marks
“March of 1911” as the date, whereas the pictures on the walls of the hallway indicate
that it is “1956” (192). To top off these already confusing and conflicting indications,
he realizes that the subjects portrayed on the photographs do not correspond to the
people that should be depicted according to the year indicated: “He [Bobby Tisdale, a
college classmate] was probably on earth in 1956, but would have been in
kindergarten or the first grade, not drinking beer on the shore of Lake Whatever”
(191). The confusion that William Andrews is experiencing in this passage of the text
can be compared to the confusion the characters in “Willa” experience when they try
to figure out what year it is.
‘Willa’, he said, ‘what year is it?’ […] ‘Nineteen … eighty-eight?’ He nodded. He would have said 1987 himself. ‘There was a girl in there wearing a T-shirt that said CROW-HEARTS SPRINGS HIGH SCHOOL, CLASS OF ’03. And if she was old enough to be in a roadhouse--’ ‘Then ’03 must have been at least three years ago’. (25)
The characters in “Willa” are initially off by almost twenty years for the date actually
is 2007. This creates a fracture between the world the characters think they
posthumously inhabit and the one they actually do. Their confusion and hesitation
exudes from the fact that they evolve in this liminal space. This particular discrepancy
is due to a displaced perception of time passing once the characters are in the afterlife.
Indeed, several of the characters experience the feeling that time is somehow
different in the afterlife. In “The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates”, the
deceased character James believes he has only been dead for a few minutes when in
fact it has been two days, as his wife informs him. However, James is the only
character of the corpus that finds his experience in the afterlife accelerated. Truly,
33
most characters confirm the general opinion that time is extremely long in hellish
afterlife scenarios. In “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French”, we
find this description of time that reads: “A million years, and that’s only the first tick
of the clock” (417). Here, time in the liminal setting of afterlife resembles the
descriptions of time spent in hell, as it is generally conceived mainly due to religious
imagery.34 We reencounter this trope elsewhere in the corpus, for example in “You
Know They Got a Hell of a Band”, where the excipit of the story expands on the
suffering that awaits Mary and Clark.
How long do they go on?” Sissy didn’t answer for nearly a minute, and Mary was getting ready to restate the question, thinking the girl either hadn’t heard or hadn’t understood, when she said: “A long time. I mean, the show will be over by midnight, they always are, it’s a town ordinance, but still… they go on a long time. Because time is different here. It might be… oh, I dunno… I think when the guys really get cooking, they sometimes go on for a year or more. (19)
We can see how in this frightening liminal afterlife scenario, time appears to be
distorted in the same way as in “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In
French”. Time is said to be much longer in Rock and Roll Heaven that it would ever
be in real life, a few hours seeming to last over a year to the characters’ great
disbelief.
The temporal defamiliarization adds to the hellish portrait of the afterlife and
impairs even further the characters’ interpretation skills as did the visual and sensory
discrepancies. Stephen King makes fright real for the characters by placing them in a
borderline afterlife scenario in which rational thinking fails them against the rules of
fantasy. Somehow, in this heterotopic place, the characters have to read past the
several stages of defamiliarization by closely interpreting their environment. Thus,
they eventually manage to unveil the information that has been kept from them.
Similarly, the reader gradually discovers in this corpus new layers to the trope of
afterlife and seeks out the revelation of truth in the end, as well as the characters do.
34 Indeed, the idea that hell lasts an eternity is conveyed by religious scriptures, most notably the Bible: “They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shunt out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.” (2 Thessalonians 1:9) The power of these scriptures lies in the very idea of eternity, for it has the same purpose that it has in King’s thanatographies; to instill fear in the reader of the text.
34
III) THE SUPERNATURAL’S CLASH WITH THE DOGMAS OF GOD
Thus every nature moves across the tide of the great sea of being to its own port, each with its given instinct as its guide.
― Dante Alighieri, Paradiso
A) THE FANTASTIC’S RULE OVER RATIONAL THINKING The study of the characterization of the protagonists and of the construction of
the liminal afterlife setting has now revealed a complex thanatographic narrative
strategy. These five short stories are a reflection on the thanatographic genre as a
means to explore new horizons in fictional literature and the various settings it can
provide. They are also a reflection on humanity dealing with their own mortality. This
third part of the analysis will deal with the fantastic and horror genres of literature
clashing with social and religious beliefs in an effort to expand on the mysteries of the
afterlife.
We can see in this corpus that Fantasy takes over the narrative and rules over rational
thinking through the characters. Tzetan Todorov masterfully described the fantastic
genre, let us remind ourselves of his precepts on fantasy and hesitation:
The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.35
In this quotation of Todorov we encounter the themes of duality and in-betweenness
that characterized the characters of this corpus as well as the liminal space they
inhabit. This description of the fantastic genre already posits a confrontational
opposition between the supernatural and “the laws of nature”. However, it is the
characters’ hesitation that allows the fantastic to take over in these five short fictions.
35 Todorov, Tzetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach To A Literary Genre. Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1973.
35
1) The Hesitation of the Characters Throughout the corpus, as we have said, the characters are brutalized both
physically and ‘mentally’ which leads them to a culminating state of hesitation. In
“The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates”, Annie recognizes her deceased
husband over the telephone, however he is not his normal self, he is said to be
“sounding uncharacteristically hesitant and unsure about himself” (99). James, in fact,
will be hesitant throughout the short story and especially when he has to chose a door
and move on in his journey in the afterlife. Despite the fact that James already knows
that he is dead, he still experiences the hesitation Todorov spoke of. For this
character, fantasy takes the form of the unusual and unexpected afterlife setting for
the story, a place that resembles Grand Central Station where you have to either take
an elevator or a door to leave. In a similar manner, the protagonist from the short
story “Afterlife” knows that he is dead but is also in a difficult position during his first
moments in the afterlife setting: “Bill walks down there, hesitates, and then knocks”
(192). We can see how, in this sentence, the mental act of hesitation is isolated by two
commas and placed at the very center of the sentence, surrounded by the first and the
last action verbs that gravitate around Bill’s underlying uncertainty.
Globally present in the corpus, the trope of uncertainty allows us to encounter
varying representations of hesitation. In “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band”, the
main characters are incredulous upon reaching their final and fatal destination. Mary
says to herself: “It’s got to be a joke […] A town called Rock And Roll Heaven? Puh-
leeze” (380). Here, the first indicator of hesitation is the question mark in the second
sentence, which clearly translates Mary’s uncertainty, even though it is constructed as
rhetoric and meant to reassure her. The two other sentences are a testament to the
story’s comical tone36 that, when contrasted to the gravity of the situation, creates
irony and reveals the characters’ nervousness. The characters in this story try very
hard to appear determined but as we can see it is only a false attempt. When they are
confronted with the manifestation of the supernatural, it takes a considerable amount
of effort for them to manage to cope with the hesitation of the fantastic irrupting in
what they thought was normal (after)life.
36 The comical tone is conveyed in this passage by the use of the word “joke” and the onomatopoeic expression “Puh-leeze”.
36
2) The Affirmation of the Fantastic The fantastic affirms its dominating position when it finally takes a full grip
on the characters’ rational thinking, when there can no longer be a reasonable
explanation for the things that are happening to them and around them. This
realization comes early for some characters such as Bill from “Afterlife”, other take
more time. In the beginning of the story, Will sees the logical discrepancies depicted
on the pictures on the wall and he affirms: “it doesn’t make sense” (192). The
possibility of the setting of the story being the world the character knew has now
vanished with a shift in perception due to the truth-revealing discrepancies. At this
point in the narrative structure of the stories, what the characters feared and was
concealed from them in the beginning is a certainty now; they are truly in a different
kind of world, however this new space remains mysterious: “There was something too
sweetly balanced about the church steeples […] The homes all looked impossibly neat
and cozy” (381). This quote from “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band” describes
the hellish town as an impossibility in relation to what could be acceptable in a world
ruled by the ‘laws of nature’. This inconceivable environment challenges any rational
explanation that the characters might provide to reassure themselves. The scenario is
to perfect to be true, too clean and too neat, as if part of a movie set, to belong to the
world of the living. The realization comes late in the narration for some characters
such as Mary who is already trapped in Rock and Roll Heaven when she faces the
supernatural: “but these rational thoughts had no chance against the dead certainty in
her guts: she was seeing a ghost” (393) The character realizes upon facing the
unknown realm of fantasy that she is entering what Todorov would call the
‘marvelous’ where the supernatural is accepted as real, and in this case it reveals itself
as frightening. Many pages after she first began to feel that something might take a
dangerous turn, she suddenly feels the certainty that things are very wrong. At this
moment, a shift occurs in the stories, for suspense is replaced by fear, exposing the
true nature of thanatography: terror.
B) THE UNKNOWN: THE TROPE OF TERROR
1) The Fear of the Unknown Indeed, the trope of terror is very much present in this corpus, and it manifests
itself under different forms in all of the stories. In these short fictions, terror is mainly
related to the notion of death and to the idea of the unknown. There is a numerous
37
amount of rhetorical questions in the corpus about what the uncertain future holds,
and most of these interrogations are left unanswered both by the characters and the
narration. In “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band”, the reader gets an insight into
Carol’s stream of consciousness that reveals how hesitant and afraid she is: “And,
after all, they were bound to come out somewhere, weren’t they?” (4) The multiple
commas used in this sentence translate the character’s hesitation, as well as the tag
question at the end of the sentence. What started out the sentence as an affirmation
reveals itself as a failed attempt at reassuring oneself. It is implied by all of the
markers of hesitation that even if the characters are bound to “come out somewhere”,
the place where they will end up will not be a pleasant one. Furthermore, if we take a
closer look at the way dialogue is constructed in “The New York Times at Special
Bargain Rates”, we realize that most of what Anne does is ask questions to her
husband. The first time she speaks in the story, she manages to ask three questions in
only six words: “James? Where are you? What happened?” (100) Her worries mainly
concern her husband’s condition as well as the place he is in, and she manages to
obtain some answers a few pages later. However, these answers are partial and
correspond to her husband’s personal perception and do not allow her (or the reader)
to draw conclusions about the afterlife. To enhance this dissatisfaction, the telephone
conversation connecting the living with the dead is cut short by the phone’s dying
battery, leaving an even larger number of questions unanswered. The thanatographic
corpus under study takes inspiration from the traditions of the murder mystery and
autobiographical genres in which interrogations are of outmost importance to the plot.
In an article entitled “Unquiet spirits: death writing in contemporary fiction”37, Alice
Bennett analyses the narrative tools of auto-thanatographies and establishes a link
between this genre’s recurring plots and the ones in murder mysteries. She says: “In contemporary fictional autothanatographies posthumous voices are used for a fictional investigation of the ideal possibility of total biography and total knowledge, offering a retelling of a life that is apparently perfected by its completeness. However, this is consistently combined with plot formations that are taken from the death-inflected genres of the murder mystery and the ghost story, which emphasise the plots that emerge when writing happens after (a) death.” (465)
37 Bennett, Alice. “Unquiet spirits: death writing in contemporary fiction”. Textual Practice, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2009) : 463-479.
38
Indeed, these two genres attempt to make sense of past lives or strange and
deadly events. It is typical of both these genres to organize their narratives in order to
culminate in an unraveling of truth. Terror in this corpus lies in the fact that the
uncovering of truth is never actually accomplished in these five stories, leaving both
the characters and the reader with uncertain information and unanswered questions
such as ‘what comes after death?’ One particular passage of the short story “Afterlife”
epitomizes the dominance of the trope of the unknown:
Harris makes a fist and knocks on the end of the pneumatic tube hanging over the laundry basket, making it swig. ‘CLIENT WANTS TO KNOW WHY WE’RE HERE! WANTS TO KNOW WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT!’ He waits. Nothing happens. He folds his hands on his desk. (198)
Here, we can see that even Harris who is said to be some sort of employee of whoever
is running the afterlife, is not given any answers as to the sense of life and death.
There is a comical note to the fact that information could come through a “pneumatic
tube hanging over the laundry basket” as if it were dirty laundry. This image destroys
the credibility of the search for answers, as does Harris’ nonchalant attitude and over-
the-top tone when he asks these questions.
The characters that lack knowledge in the corpus are the ones that are the most
confused and that go about wandering aimlessly. Harris is very much a part of this
category, as are, for example, the characters in the abandoned train station in “Willa”.
Contrary to the eponymous character and her fiancé, the rest of the characters have
not accepted their deaths and in consequence, cannot leave the train station that they
believe is going to save them. They are bound to wander this deserted scenario until
truth hits them as it did Willa in the beginning and David later, once she had
convinced him. Without the knowledge of truth, the acceptance of this new reality is
impossible. We can see this idea best exemplified in the pilot from “The New York
Times at Special Bargain Rates”. In this story, James is ready to leave the train station
through one of the doors, however the pilot of the plane that killed them all is not.
James establishes a perfect link between the acceptance of truth and the character’s
immobility in the following description of the pilot’s state: “And the pilot keeps
screaming. Or maybe it’s the co-pilot. I think he’s going to be here for quite a while.
He just wanders around. He’s very confused.” (104) In this passage we reencounter a
type-character of the corpus, one that is confined in the liminal afterlife setting due to
39
his lack of knowledge of reality. The sight of this kind of characterization is
frightening to those who are aware of the situation such as James and the couple in
“Willa”. Their goal is to unravel the mysteries of their afterlife and to stay away from
deluded characters. Generally though, not much is certain for the characters, even for
those who are aware of their death. In spite of the narrative voices being extra-
diegetic, the readers have no further information as to what becomes of the characters.
However, it seems somewhat inevitable that what awaits them are bad things.
Indeed, the corpus is shrouded with elements that suggest a negative and destructive
future in the liminal afterlife. In “That Feeling You Can Only Say What It Is In
French”, the couple is driving to their final and deadly destination and the narration
points out at this inevitable outcome before it is truly revealed to all: “Sure enough,
the road petered out. Over the first hill, the yellow line disappeared again” (374). The
images of the destruction of the road and the disappearance of the yellow line
foreshadow the deaths of the characters. Also, the use of the adverbial idiom “sure
enough” accentuates the inevitability of this fate.
Furthermore, the descriptions of natural sceneries around Rock and Roll
Heaven accentuate the ominous tone of the text and of the ambiance in general.
The balsam smell of the trees was heavenly, and she thought there was something beautiful about the silence, unbroken as it was by the sound of any motor […] or human voice… but there was something spooky about it as well. (376)
As we can see in this story, the description of the natural scenery is one more element
of narration used to convey the dangerous unknown. The description of the forest sets
a spooky mood, and with it, instills fear in the characters and perhaps also in the
reader. Another way to convey the inevitable danger inherent to the unknown is the
use of the simple future that leaves no possibility for change. In “Afterlife”, for
example, the manager Isaac Harris explains to Bill what will happen if he does not
accept his death: “You will have a fleeting sense, almost a surety, that there is
more…[…] But it will pass […] You will die of the same cancer.” (198) Sometimes
in this corpus, the dominant trope of the unknown allows certainties to be pronounced
about what will happen in the future. As we can see from the last quote, these
certainties only affirm terror for the deceased characters, for they confirm the
suffering that awaits them. Terror is experienced in a gradual manner in the short
40
stories under study, gaining in intensity as the notions of the unknown and death are
explored.
2) The Omnipresence of Death Death is vastly explored in this corpus by the means of the thanatographic
narrative technique and the different fictional afterlife settings. This is done with the
intent of adding emotional impact to the stories on the level of the diegesis as well as
for the readers. Death is omnipresent in these stories as the thematic fuel for the
effects required by the genre of horror fiction. Throughout his lifetime work, Stephen
King has repeatedly made use of the theme of death to convey fear and horror. King
published a semi-autobiographical book called On Writing in 2000, in which he
affirms his fascination with the theme of death. He shares with the reader a personal
memory of a time when he was five or six years old, when his mother told him about
the different people she had seen die in her life. Stephen King then makes a statement
about how he never forgot those stories.
On some other day she told me about the one she saw—a sailor who jumped off the roof of the Graymore Hotel in Portland, Maine, and landed in the street. “He splattered,” my mother said in her most matter-of-fact tone. She paused, then added, “The stuff that came out of him was green. I have never forgotten it.” That makes two of us, Mom.38
In this corpus, Stephen King explores his childhood fascination with death. His
memory of his mother telling him frightening stories of people dying and committing
suicide has been transposed in this corpus in an equally terrifying afterlife setting.
On the one hand, horror in this corpus is represented by the vitality of the dead in two
of the five short stories; “The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates” and “You
Know They Got a Hell of a Band”. In the first of these stories, fear is experienced by
a woman who tries to understand the vitality of her deceased husband, and in the
second, we read about a group of deceased musicians that have inexplicably come
alive. On the other hand, two of the stories depict horror by expanding on the fear of
dying; those stories are “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French” and
“Afterlife”. In these two stories, the fear of dying manifests itself in the fact that the
38 King, Stephen. On Writing. New York: Scribner, 2000. Print.
41
characters are so reluctant to accepting their deaths that they relive their afterlife
several times in a cyclic manner. “Willa”, the last of these stories, could fit into both
of these categories, for it depicts the vitality of the deceased as well as the fear of
dying of said deceased characters who cannot manage to see the reality that is
exposed to them by the eponymous character.
Furthermore, the presence of the lexical fields of fear, anger and violence in these
short fictions enhances the trope of horror. These three notions, in that order, function
as a gradation of the different emotions the characters go through. One passage that
epitomizes this general movement towards violence can be found in “Willa”, where
the fear of accepting one’s death pushes a mother to be violent towards her own child:
“Without looking in her direction, Georgia Anderson flipped Willa the bird. Her other
hand shook Pammy back and forth. David saw a child flop in one direction, a charred
corpse in the other” (35). The final image in this sentence reminds the reader of the
brutal conditions of death for the characters in “Willa”. Furthermore, the harshness of
the image is enhanced by the fact that it is a child’s burnt body that is depicted.
Indeed, the trope of death prevails in this corpus, but since the majority of the
characters do not realize that they are dead, this trope is mostly alluded to in
numerous ominous narrative items that can be found in each of the stories. For
example, in “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French”, a loop is playing
in Carol head as a foreshadowing mantra: “all the hard days are coming.” This mantra
that announces the hardship and suffering that is yet to come is supported by a series
of morbid images that flash through Carol’s stream of consciousness. As we have
already commented, several characters in this corpus experience flashbacks or
analeptic episodes, that transpose the characters to a different time and make them
relive events from their past lives. Some of these analeptic episodes can be included
in the corpus’ lexical field of death for they call to remembrance morbid events of the
main characters’ lives. It is the case for Carol who is reminded of a difficult time in
her life that corresponds to the event of an abortion:
Horrible as it was to say, things had started turning around when she lost the baby. […] Lost the baby, had a miscarriage –they all believed that except maybe Bill. Certainly her family had believed it: Dad, Mom, Gram. ‘Miscarriage’ was the story they told, miscarriage was a Catholic’s story if there ever was one. (410)
42
Death appears to be central to Carol’s recollections of her past as a time of suffering.
Thus, the trope of death becomes ubiquitous; it is present in the time of the diegesis,
and it is furthermore transposed to the characters’ past as well. So great is the trope of
death in this corpus that it also represents an entity of the future. The presence of the
trope of death in future scenarios is interesting due to the fact that it concerns
characters that are not yet dead. Indeed, in “The New York Times at Special Bargain
Rates”, death is transposed to the future by the means of a deceased character’s
deadly premonition. James gives his wife a couple of confusing messages before the
telephone conversation is ended, and Annie understands these messages to be
warnings of accidents that will happen in the future. Here again, we find that time
discrepancies make the reading of the diegetic information difficult. James says to his
wife: “And don’t go to the bakery anymore on Sundays. Something’s going to happen
there, and I know it’s going to be on a Sunday, but I don’t know which Sunday. Time
really is funny here.” (103) What James predicts is confirmed when the bakery
explodes on a Sunday leaving Annie unharmed thanks to the premonitions from
beyond. Thus, the trope of death is introduced to the corpus by the means of prolepsis.
This literary device places the theme of death in an alternative future setting. The
introduction in the narration of future deadly scenarios confirms one more time the
omnipresence and inevitability of death.
Death in this corpus of short fictions is represented as a frightful event from
which the characters suffer due to a lack of knowledge about their own condition, and
the unpredictability of place they inhabit. Here, the trope of the afterlife that has
inspired such number of literary works is explored through the literary genre of horror
and its themes of predilection. The logical imaginary backdrops one could imagine for
these stories from beyond are those commonly known to modern society. However, in
this corpus we find horror and the fantastic pushing the limits of these predictable
backdrops. A considerable amount of the societal imagery attached to the notion of
the afterlife is depicted by different religious beliefs existing in modern culture. The
following is a partial study of the treatment of religion in these texts that challenge
our preconceived notions of the afterlife.
43
C) KING’S FANTASTIC IMAGINARY AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE RELIGIOUS WORL VIEW
1) Religion Anchored in American Society In this corpus, the thematic and symbolic trope of religion is very present. All
of the five short stories display expressions or allusions to religion. The semantic field
of religion and religious belief is conveyed first and foremost by the afterlife imagery.
The dogmas of faith such as heaven, hell and purgatory are often mentioned in the
corpus, and, as they do in American popular culture, they remind the reader of the
close link established between religion and the afterlife. The theme of religion is
epitomized in “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French”, where religion
establishes a link between Carol’s past life (in the form of memories from her catholic
upbringing) and her afterlife (with the reappearing images of the Virgin Mary). Other
instances of the lexical field of religion establish a connection between religion and
American society. It is the case in “Willa”, where the characters come across a bar
with a patriotic sign displayed outside the building:
The bar was a horseshoe with a neon replica of the Wind River Range floating overhead. It was red, white, and blue; in Wyoming, they did seem to love their red, white, and blue. A neon sign in similar colors proclaimed YOU ARE IN GOD’S COUNTRY PARTNER. It was flanked by the Budweiser logo on the left and the Coors logo on the right. (18)
This description of the front of a Wyoming bar anchors religion as one of the
distinguishing characteristics of the United States of America together with American
brands of beer, the colors of the American flag and the natural landscape of the
Wyoming Range of mountains. All of the elements of this description are here to offer
a picture of America and affirm the central position religion has in it, in the passage as
well as in American popular culture. The use of the capital letters conveys a sense of
glorification of “God’s country”, as do the colors of the sign by association with the
colors of the American flag. We get a sense of the importance of religion in regards to
the ‘real’ world and the diegetic world; God’s country is in fact Wyoming as well as
the characters’ afterlife environment. A similar rhetoric can be applied to “You Know
They Got a Hell of a Band”, where “Lou Reed’s Busload of Faith” (372) is playing on
the jukebox while Mary and Clark begin to understand the terrible situation they are
in. In the 1950’s Americana setting for this after life ‘resting’ place, the reference to
Lou Reed has two different functions. First, it conveys that feeling of the dinner being
44
a true American experience with the music of one of the country’s biggest icon.
Second, it establishes a link between that musical American identity and the religious
faith Lou Reed is singing about. However, if we take a closer look at the lyrics of
Busload of Faith, we realize that the song depicts religion in a rather negative way,
saying that “you can’t depend on God” to protect from the harshness of life. For the
readers who do not know the lyrics to this song, the reference could be interpreted as
a celebration of religious belief, multiplying the possible readings of the text. On a
diegetic level, Mary herself begins to turn to religious belief: “And Mary found
herself praying – really, really praying – for the first time in perhaps twenty years.
Please. God, make him see it’s not a joke.” (395) The theme of religion has been
transferred to the characters as they attempt to find courage in their distress. In this
sense, we realize the number of characters in the corpus that are themselves
representative of the notion of religion, simply because of their names. There is Mary,
recently discussed, who not only bears the name of a religious icon but also turns to
religion herself as we have seen. There is also David from the short story Willa, as
well as Isaac and Andrews from the short fiction “Afterlife”, and finally there is
James from “The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates”. We realize that at least
one main character in each short story bears the name of a Christian figure, thus
highlighting the trope of religion in the corpus.
2) Religion as an Ominous Motif If we take a closer look at the manner in which this prevailing religious theme
is presented we can see religion as an ominous instance that is sometimes responsible
for the character’s pain and suffering. Here, we find again the theme of death to be
associated with religion. In “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French”,
death and pain are announced through religious symbols such as “three crosses on the
right side of the road” (404), indicating where three people have died. The crosses’
function is that of a mirror, showing the characters in denial that they are deceased as
well. However, the characters do not come to this realization at first, and so the
indicators of death are multiplied throughout the text. Still in the thematic of
travelling, the protagonist, Carol, is depicted as being on a journey that can only lead
to death and eternal damnation: “They were going to go down this road and down this
road, they were for the white Crow Vic and the white Crow Vic was for them, forever
45
and ever, amen.” (419) This passage constitutes the moment in the narration when it
is finally stated that the story being told is about the afterlife and that there is no
alternative scenario to the characters’ outcome but eternity in a hellish cycle. The
passage is constructed to resemble a Christian prayer, with the repetition and variation
of certain elements of the sentence, as well as the common final expression of faith,
“amen”, at the end of the passage. The function of the quote is to reaffirm Carol’s
final judgment pronounced by the repetition of the terms “ever” and “down this road”.
Furthermore, the chiasmic structure at the center of the sentences creates a link
between the road and eternity, between man and the afterlife construction religion has
reserved for him. Due to the fact that the corpus under study is influenced by the
genre of horror, it is only logical that the fate reserved for the deceased characters
would be one in which the characters suffer.
In fact, the corpus reflects the Christian religious belief that a person’s afterlife
can be either a reward or a punishment for the said person’s life choices and actions.
If the person was good during his life, he deserves Heaven, if he was a bad person he
is going to Hell. In the short story “Afterlife”, for example, Isaac Harris explains how
he is trapped in his afterlife job as a manager of the newly deceased characters due to
his wrongdoings when he was still alive. In fact, his boring confinement serves as
punishment for having killed 146 of his workers by leaving the emergency exits
locked during a fire. For this reason, Harris is confined to his earthly office in the new
afterlife setting as if he were serving time for the crimes he committed during his life.
This idea that the dead characters are in their respective afterlife scenarios due to life
mistakes that need to be redeemed is found in several of the short stories. In “That
Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French”, Carol experiences remorse as she
remembers some incidents of her life that make her reflect upon the role of religion in
a person’s life. On this subject she says that “God says take what you want… and pay
for it” (410), implying that nothing is free in life and that everything will be
accounted for in the afterlife. The reader does not get the impression that Carol is
paying for one particular incident in her life in the same manner as Harris is, but we
understand from this passage that she does have some redeeming to do in her liminal
and hellish afterlife setting.
However, Christian belief allows for people to confess and repent for their sins, the
following quotation from the Bible exemplifies this: “He touched my mouth with it
and said, ‘Behold, this has touched your lips; and your iniquity is taken away and
46
your sin is forgiven.’”39 In the short stories, we also find this idea that people can
repent for their sins. For example, in “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band”, Mary
and Clark are lost and Mary suggests to her husband that they turn around, to which
Clark answers: “Uh-huh. Now if you only had a sign that said REPENT.” (2) This can
be interpreted as Clark’s wasted chance to accept his wrongdoings and consequently
save himself and his wife from damnation. In Christian ideology, a person’s
punishment for his life sins comes in the afterlife as this following quote from the
Bible shows well: “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the
soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”40
Clark’s comment from “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band” foreshadows what
happens to the couple at the end of the story: Clark will carry out being stubborn and
not accepting his mistakes and for this he is condemned to remain in the hellish town
of Rock and Roll Heaven.
3) Ritual Reenactment: The Trope of the Afterlife Furthermore, we can see that the theme of religion in the afterlife setting also
manifests itself through the notion of ritual reenactment. As we have previously
observed, the characters of this corpus experience a sort of rite of passage from life to
death and they continue this journey in the afterlife. This rite of dying takes on a
ceremonial and religious tone when it is combined with narrative repetition. In some
of the short stories, ritualistic reenactment is conveyed linguistically by the repetition
of words or expressions. It is the case, for example, of "That Feeling, You Can Only
Say What It Is In French" where the phrase "all the hard days are coming" is repeated
several times throughout the story. The same sort of phrasal repetition is found in
"Willa" as well, where the eponymous character repeats three times to her fiancé "you
don’t see what's right in front of your eyes". This narrative repetition gives the texts a
cyclic structure, where certain recurring elements of the narration are put forward.
This narrative technique is reminiscent of some religious texts such as the Gloria:
"Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the
beginning is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen". This prayer can be
repeated up to four times during a catholic mass due to the fact that it encapsulates the
Christian belief in the dogma of the Holy Trinity. The intent behind the ritualistic 39 The Holy Bible. New York: American Bible Society, 1989. (Isaiah 6:7) 40 The Holy Bible. New York: American Bible Society, 1989. (Matt 10:28)
47
repetition of certain phrases is the same in mass as it is in this corpus; to highlight the
most important elements of the (ceremonial) texts.
In other cases, ritualistic reenactment is conveyed by a repetitive narrative
structure. This characteristic is mostly found in "That Feeling, You Can Only Say
What It Is In French". This short story is basically constructed by putting together
three times the same story, as we have already commented on when speaking of
Carol’s ‘recurring nightmares’. Indeed, the whole short story is structurally divided
into three parts that are nearly exactly the same story of the couple in the airplane and
then driving down to the hotel where they will spend their holidays. Throughout the
story, Carol believes she is experiencing a long lasting and powerful déjà-vu but the
reality is that she has gone through what is being narrated several times already. At
the end of the short story, Stephen King expresses his thoughts about it and tells the
reader that he thinks “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French” is a
story about hell and that hell is in fact repetition.41 In this short story, we see Carol
going through the same experience three times, but the text implies that there will be
many more times to come. Similarly, the short story “Afterlife” presents life after
death as a repetitive structure. However, in this case, the character gets a chance to
relive his life, not some afterlife imaginary construction as Carol. Indeed, Bill from
“Afterlife” learns from the afterlife manager Isaac that he can relive his entire life
without any changes, and Bill choses to do so for the fifteenth time. This means that
Bill’s character has previously died a total of fifteen times and that each time he has
decided to enter an additional cycle of reenactment of his past life.
Furthermore, this proleptic narrative repetition is enhanced by the use of the iterative
mode of narration, intended to show how repetitive the afterlife scenario is for these
characters. In this sense, Isaac Harris keeps telling Bill that they have gone through
what is being narrated several times already: “You always ask the same thing.” (192)
The iterative mode is also found in “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In
French”, where the characters are said to be constant throughout time and death: “left
eyebrow, right dimple, always the same” (403). The repetition implied by the iterative
mode gives a great amount of temporal depth to the stories, for the cycles that are 41 « I think the story is about Hell. A version of it where you are condemned to do the same thing over and over again. Existentialism, baby, what a concept ; paging Albert Camus. There’s an idea that Hell is other people. My idea is that it might be repetition. » King, Stephen. The Bazaar Of Bad Dreams. New York: Scribner, 2015. p. 423.
48
depicted carry out the repetitive structure to the fictional past and to the presumable
future as well.
In fact, the temporal reach of religion in the afterlife could not be greater for it is said
to last for all eternity. According to Christian belief, once a person dies, he or she will
spend eternity either in heaven, hell or purgatory. The notion of eternity is very
present in this corpus, manifesting itself in all of the short stories under study. For
instance, in the final pages of “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band”, the main
characters encounter Sissy, another victim that has been forced to take on a job and
stay in Rock and Roll Heaven. She is the one who explains to them just how long
time can be in this hellish town. Sissy tells them that she has been twenty-three years
old for “six years, at least. Or maybe it’s eight. Or nine.” (20) Not only has this
character lost track of time, but she has altogether stopped aging too, which implies
that she could technically stay in Rock and Roll Heaven forever. This idea is
supported by the very last sentences of the story in an ominous declaration:
“BECAUSE ROCK AND ROLL WILL NEVER DIE! […] That’s what I’m afraid of.
That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.” (21) The possibility of spending eternity in the
different scenarios is the most frightening aspect of these liminal spaces, and as we
have said, it concerns the totality of the deceased characters.
4) Alternative Representations of the Afterlife However, in spite of the overwhelming presence of a religious imaginary
related to the afterlife in the texts, religion is not the dominating instance in this
corpus. Stephen King presents a number of scenarios that are clearly inspired by the
catholic dogmas of faith, but an in depth analysis of these scenarios proves that the
ruling literary entity remains the fantastic genre. Rosemary Jackson’s insight into the
Fantastic brings us to a closer understanding of the relationship between religion and
literature. In her book Fantasy The Literature of Subversion42, she reminds the reader
of Heidegger’s definition of the uncanny:
The ‘uncanny’ is a term which has been used philosophically as well as in psychoanalytic writing, to indicate a disturbing, vacuous area. Heidegger described as ‘uncanny’ that empty space produced by a loss of faith in divine images. Unable to reach, or to imagine reaching, ‘God’s sphere of being’, man is left with a sense of vacancy. ‘Indeed,’ writes Heidegger, ‘in proportion with the
42 Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York: Routlegde, 2003.
49
impossibility [of setting himself in the place of God] something far more uncanny may happen…’. (63)
Heidegger defines the uncanny as “a loss of faith”, and in this sense, his
argumentation can be related to what the characters experience in the afterlife, where
prayers are unheard and question are unanswered. The void that is left by the lack of
faith is here replaced by ‘the uncanny’ as we have pointed out, and most importantly,
it is replaced by the Fantastic. We have seen the importance of the fantastic genre in
regards to the characters and the hesitation they experience when coping with the
irruption of the supernatural in what they thought was normality. Now, the
supernatural rules over religion by exposing an array of alternative afterlife
representations radically opposed to the teachings of religion. In “Willa” and in “The
New York Times at Special Bargain Rates”, for example, we encounter the literary
trope of the ghost. In the first story, the ghosts are fairly similar to the ‘haunting
ghost’ type of character known to fantastic literature. Willa and David are deceased
but can still roam the world of the living, only they are no longer physically visible to
the people that are alive. In the second story, James’ characterization is innovative: he
is dead in an unknown place and must choose a door in order to continue his journey
through the afterlife. Upon learning this, his wife hopes that one of those doors could
lead him back to the world of the living. However, she quickly reconsiders her wishes
when she imagines the frightening possibilities if her dead husband returned from the
afterlife: Find your way home, she almost says. Find the right door and find your way home. But if he did, would she want to see him? A ghost might be all right, but what if she opened the door on a smoking cinder with red eyes and the remains of a jean (he always traveled in jeans) melted into his legs? (103)
In this passage, we can see how the fantastic genre allows imagination to roam free
and thus multiplies the possible outcomes for each story. “Afterlife” is the short story
that challenges the most catholic representations of life after death by presenting not
one but an array of alternative afterlife constructions.
The first of these alternative constructions is the possibility for Bill to come back
from the dead and relive his entire life, which he decides to do yet another time. The
idea that a man gets to relive his life after his death is a fictional construction highly
in contrast with the religious dogmas of heaven and hell conveyed by Christianity. To
accentuate this contrast between religion and the fantastic genre, the narration also
50
introduces the notion of reincarnation, which is what Bill hopes for at the beginning
of the story. In this sense, the fantastic challenges the preconceived notions of the
afterlife that the reader might have from religious teachings. Here, it offers the reader
and the characters an alternative afterlife scenario borrowed from the Oriental
spiritual belief in reincarnation. According to this ideology, Bill could return from the
dead as any kind of living being as the following quote shows: “As long as he doesn’t
have to come back as a dung beetle, or something.” (192) However, reincarnation is
not the subject matter of this story, or at least not in the typical sense for when Bill
asks Isaac Harris if he will be reincarnated, the latter answers: “not really.” (192)
Indeed, Bill has a choice between reliving his life in a kind of personalized
reincarnation and just dying in a straightforward manner that would imply him
leaving forever the world of the living as well as the world of the dead. Harris
describes the second option as: “you wink out. Poof. Candle-in-the-wind type of
thing.” (196) This alternative ‘afterdeath’ scenario is close to the atheist belief that
nothing happens after death, expect that in “Afterlife”, the notion of nothingness is
embellished by the fantastic construction of the afterlife management and the choice
Bill has to make.
As we can see, these five pieces of American fiction put imagination and the
marvelous forward by debunking Christian constructions of the afterlife. Indeed, there
is no reason as to why the protagonists find themselves in difficult and sometimes
horrifying afterlife situations; no karmic or spiritual forces are at work. The fantastic
can irrupt in any given life, as well as in death, and at any given time. In the excipit of
“You Know They Got a Hell of a Band” the narrative voice explains the characters’
fate in the following terms: She and Clark had stumbled into Rock and Roll Heaven, but it was actually Rock and Roll Hell. This had not happened because they were evil people; it had not happened because the old gods were punishing them; it had happened because they had gotten lost in the woods, that was all, and getting lost in the woods was a thing that could happen to anybody. (416)
This conclusive quote proves well Stephen King’s position in regards to the theme of
the afterlife, it is for him yet another narrative item that allows him to expand and
glorify his genres of predilection; horror and most importantly fantasy.
51
* * *
CONCLUSION: We have attempted to answer the question of how the thanatographic genre
brings about a liminal afterlife setting in which the fantastic genre challenges the
preconceived notions of the afterlife This has been done by the means of the study of
the main themes and literary techniques at work in the narratives.
In the first part of the analysis of the five short stories, we studied Stephen
King’s characterization of the protagonists as subjects suffering from multiple sorts of
ailments that prevent them from having a clear understanding of their deceased state.
As they move forward in their journey through death, the characters are deprived of
their language skills, of their memory and even of their vision, placing them in a
vulnerable position of ignorance. In parallel, the reader also experiences the
depravation of knowledge through character identification, with the intent of
obtaining a suspenseful reading experience. Indeed, in many of the short stories in this
corpus, the characters’ realization of their own death is delayed in order to obtain a
narrative intrigue that leads up to a climactic revelation of truth.
In the second part of this study, we saw how, in order to carry out this
narrative structure, Stephen King makes use of the trope of defamiliarization that
introduces recognizable elements of life into the unknown afterlife setting, and thus
instills confusion in the characters. Faithful to the genres it is rooted in, thanatography
makes use of the uncanny to delay the denouement of the plot as well as to create an
atmosphere of strangeness. The setting for these stories revealed itself as a liminal
space (similar to Foucault’s heterotopias) in which defamiliarization is coupled with
temporal discrepancies with the intent to maximize the characters’ distress.
In the final section, the study pointed out the similarities between the common
societal representations of hell and the liminal heterotopic space in which the
deceased characters take action. The representation of this hellish setting guided us
towards the analysis of the omnipresent notion of religion as yet another familiar
point of reference for the characters, as well as for the readers. However, as confusion
52
concerning the plot and the environment dispersed, the religious trope revealed itself
as the representation of a threatening ominous institution. With the characters’
eventual realization of their death came the triumph of the fantastic genre over
rational and religious thinking. Once the protagonists gave up on rationalism, they
gave in to the uncanny and the marvelous and faced the endless possibilities of life
after death. In this way, the supernatural manages to fill the vacuum of the lack of
religious belief that the fantastic genre might imply, offering various alternative
scenarios in which imagination debunks the dogmas of religion.
Our study began by a series of interrogations; one of them concerned the
characters and their literary function in the five short stories. Innovation was brought
in this corpus by the simple fact that it put in action a group of atypical characters,
due to their deceased state. By giving these commonly silenced subjects a voice,
Stephen King managed to make of their situation a central focal point of the stories,
thus bypassing the general belief that the format of the short story does not allow
much room for character development. In this corpus, the treatment of the deceased
characters (as well as the polyphonic mode of narration) actually supports the choice
of such format, for it gives a greater power to suspense and delivers the necessary
effect required for a gripping narrative and a successful denouement. In this sense,
one could wonder how prosopopeia and thanatographic writing could be addressed in
a longer literary format such as the novel?
Furthermore, we asked ourselves the question of what the thanatographic
genre implied in the context of an afterlife narrative. It could be argued that the genre
offers Stephen King the freedom to explore the trope of life after death by the means
of the characters and the setting. This freedom of writing also exudes from the
fantastic genre, which goes beyond any rational or societal preconceived idea one
could have about the afterlife and life itself. In this sense, Stephen King goes as far as
presenting not only the afterlife, but also the world of the living as a heterotopic space
in which the supernatural can emerge at any moment, as “You Know They Got a Hell
of a Band” affirms in its excipit43.
43 It had happened because they had gotten lost in the woods, that was all, and getting lost in the woods was a thing that could happen to anybody” (416) Quote from the short story “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band”. King, Stephen. Nightmares & Dreamscapes. New York: Viking, 1993.
53
Thus, this corpus can be interpreted as a glorification of the fantastic genre
and its creative and imaginative freedom that extends to all aspects of literature and, if
one is brave enough to believe, to all aspects of life and death as well.
King makes use of the thanatographic genre to engage the reader into a cultural and
almost philosophical reflection on death and the fate of men after it. Through an
identifiable characterization of the protagonists, he reanimates in the reader a silenced
plight for answers and explanations on the afterlife. Upon reading these stories, we
find our total attention focused on the plot, immersed in the climactic diegesis. The
suspenseful structure of the narratives and the ambivalence of the setting create the
desire for a satisfactory denouement, which never occurs. By exploring the notion of
the afterlife, King pushes the metaphysical reflection to the boundaries of the
unknown. We are lead, through this corpus, to look beyond the godly and societal
explanations of life after death.
Through Fantasy, King draws a spiral-esque trajectory in his reflection; starting with a
literary quest for answers on the diegetic ground floor, and ending with a similar
(though much more arduous) quest for metaphysical answers on a second level of
interpretation. Far from a philosophical study, this corpus leaves the reader on the last
level of interpretation with only a hint of spiritual inquiry, for its true purpose is a
successful literary experience. That, King delivers in the form of well-constructed and
gripping short narratives that explore topics nowadays far from common in the
literary realm.
54
BIBLIOGRAPHY CORPUS OF SHORT STORIES (5): King, Stephen. Everything's Eventual. New York: Scribner, 2002. - That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French King, Stephen. Just After Sunset. New York: Scribner, 2008. -The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates -Willa King, Stephen. Nightmares & Dreamscapes. New York: Viking, 1993. -You Know They Got a Hell of a Band King, Stephen. The Bazaar Of Bad Dreams. New York: Scribner, 2015. -Afterlife BOOKS by Stephen King : King, Stephen. Stephen King's Danse Macabre. New York: Everest House, 1981. Print. King, Stephen. On Writing. London : Hodder & Stoughton, 2000. BOOKS on Stephen King : Astic, Guy and Jean Marigny. Colloque de Cerisy : autour de Stephen King. L’Horreur Contemporaine. Paris : Bragelonne, 2008. Beahm, George. The Stephen King Companion. Kansas : Andrews McMeel Publishing, 1989. Bloom, Harold. Stephen King. New York : Chelsea House Publisher, 2007. Docherty, Brian. American Horror Fiction : From Brockden to Stephen King. New York : St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Sears, John. Stephen King's Gothic. Cardiff, Wales: University of Wales Press, 2011.
55
Timpone, Anthony. Stephen King, Clive Barker : Les maitres de la terreur, Interviews et conversations intimes avec deux des hommes les plus terrifiants de la planète. Pantin : Naturellement, 1999. CRITICISM: BOOKS : Dante, Alighieri, C. H Sisson, and David H Higgins. The Divine Comedy, Oxford [England] : Oxford University Press, 1993 Barthes, Roland. Fragments D'un Discours Amoureux. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977. Burke, Edmund A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Menston: Scolar P.,1757. Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy Of Horror, Or, Paradoxes Of The Heart. New York: Rootledge, 1990. Depretto, Catherine, eds. L’Héritage de Bakhtine. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1997. Derrida, Jacques. Mémoires: pour Paul de Man. Paris: Galilée, 1988.
Derrida, Jacques. Otobiographies: L’enseignement de Nietzche et la politique du nom propre. Paris: Galilée, 1984.
Falconer, Rachel. Hell In Contemporary Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Genette, Gérard. Figures III. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972. Gusdorf, Georges. La Parole. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986. Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York: Routledge, 2003. Landowski, Eric, eds. Le Carré Sémiotique. Paris: L’institut de la Langue Française 1981. Saussure, Ferdinand de and al. Cours De Linguistique Générale. Paris: Payot, 1995. Todorov, Tzetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach To A Literary Genre. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973
56
The Holy Bible. New York: American Bible Society, 1989 CRITICISM: ARTICLES : Bennett, Alice. “Unquiet spirits: death writing in contemporary fiction”. Textual Practice, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2009) : 463-479. Cohen, Tom. “The Ideology of Dialogue: The Bakhtin/De Man (Dis)Connection” Cultural Critique, No. 33 (1996) : 41-86. Deanda, Elena. “On Joy, Death, And Writing: From Autobiography To Autothanatography In Clarice Lispector's Works”. Working Papers in Romance Languages Vol. 1. No. 1 (2006): n. pag. Web. 4 Sept. 2015. Lambert, Gregg. “De-Facing Derrida”. SubStance, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2005) : 53-59. Lawrence, James Cooper. “A Theory of the Short Story”. The North American Review, Vol. 205, No. 735 (1917) : 274- 286. Margolin, Uri. Russian Formalism . The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press (1994). Nishimura, Satoshi. “Thomas Hardy and the Language of the Inanimate”. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 43, No. 4 (2003) : 897-912. Paul de Man. “Autobiography as De-Facement”. MLN, Vol. 94, No. 5 (1979) : 919-930. Poe, Edgar Allan. “Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews”, Library of America. (1984) pp. 569–77. Riffaterre, Michael. “Prosopopeia”. Yale French Studies, No 69 (1985) : 107-123. Schor, Noami. “Roland Barthes: Necrologies”. SubStance, Vol. 14, No. 3, Issue 48 (1986) : 27-33. Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Technique”. Russian Formalist Criticism: four essays. Translated and with an Introduction by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press: 1965. Watts, Erik King. “Voice and Voicelessness in Rhethorical Studies”. Quaterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 87, No. 2 (2001) : 179-196.
57
Zaharchenko, Tanya. “Thesaurus of the Unspeakable: Thanatopraxis in Kharvik’s Tale of Trauma”. The Modern Language Review, Vol. 109, No. 2 (2014) : 462-481. LECTURES: Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias." Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984): 46-49. Original Publication: Conférence au Cercle d'études architecturales, 14 mars 1967 WEBSITES : "Defamiliarization - New World Encyclopedia". Newworldencyclopedia.org. N.p., 2016. Web. 3 Mar. 2016. "Prosopopoeia - Definition Of Prosopopoeia In English From The Oxford Dictionary". Oxforddictionaries.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 12 Feb. 2016. "Stephen King Using Gothic Literature". 123helpme.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 31 Mar. 2016.